How They See It

For the past nine years, Tire Review has asked its readers one very important question: How well do the tire brands you offer perform for you?
Tire dealers decide which tire brands to carry and sell for any number of reasons. Some are market related; others are based in loyalty. All of them are legitimate, certainly. But with our annual Tire Brands Study, we try to capture dealer opinions and perceptions on key matters that can directly relate to the dealer’s ability to successfully market, sell and profit from a tire brand.
In the past, the Study didn’t differentiate between market segments and was divided into two parts based on the number of responses received for each brand. This year, for the first time, we have expanded the Study into two segments – Consumer Tire (encompassing passenger, light truck/SUV and performance tires) and Commercial Tire (medium truck tire only).
And within the Consumer Tire segment, we created two divisions – Manufacturer Brands and Private Brands ®“ so that each brand could to be compared more evenly and directly, better reflecting their relative positions in the industry.
The results of our 2001 Consumer Tire Brand Study are presented here. See our December issue for the results of our Commercial Tire Brand Study.
It’s important to note that this annual Study measures only the opinions and perceptions of the tire dealers who carry these brands. How a dealer feels about the tire brands he or she carries is a very powerful measure; as they say in advertising “Perception Is Reality.”
Respondents were not permitted to comment on brands they did not carry, end-users were not polled in any way, and Tire Review did not physically test any tires. The results presented here reflect the pure opinions of tire dealers.
Our Babcox Research unit conducted this Study, analyzing tire dealer responses from 500 completed telephone surveys. Every effort was made to obtain a fair sampling of responses and assure the number of responses gathered was consistent with accepted industry brand marketshare figures.

The Categories

Dealers were asked to rate the performance of each brand of tire they carried on a 1 to 10 scale – 10 being highest ®“ on a series of categories.
For the Consumer Tire segment, dealers graded each brand by:
Product Availability – How easy it was to get needed tires.
Line Coverage – How well the brand covered the dealers product needs.
Delivery – How quickly tires were received once an order was placed.
Benefit of Merchandising – How well did brand advertising, POS materials or promotions work.
Product Quality – How well did the brand physically perform.
Product Innovation – How cutting edge are the brand’s products.
Fill Rate – How complete tire orders were once they were received.
Profitability of Brand – How well the brand delivered real profit dollars.
In addition, an aggregate score for each brand was calculated, averaging the results from each category. This gives readers a view of the “complete package” each brand delivers.

Key Changes

We also made a few changes in the categories against which we asked tire dealers to grade the brands they carried. Previously used categories like Terms, Territory Protection and Dealer/Supplier Relations were dropped as their relevance had diminished.
We added Fill Rate as a separate category to define that more clearly against Delivery, which remains a category. Finally, we changed Ability to Deliver Profits to Profitability of Brand for clarity purposes, and switched Merchandising Support to Benefit of Merchandising Support to better address the actual impact of each brand’s advertising, promotion and POS efforts vs. what the various brands provide – quality vs. quantity.
In all, well over 100 tire brands were mentioned by dealers participating in this year’s Consumer Tire Study. The final cutoff for consideration in this year’s Study was 14 mentions or a 2.8% representation among all dealers participating. For reporting purposes, only the top five brands (and all ties) are shown in the results below.
For a complete copy of this year’s Tire Review Tire Brands Study, contact Bob Roberts at 330-670-1234 ext. 252, or at [email protected].