Yet once again, Ducati has topped Pied Piper Prospect Satisfaction Index (PSI) – showing the continued prowess of Ducati dealerships in the United States.
For those that aren’t familiar with Pied Piper, the company’s Prospect Satisfaction Index is sort of the Consumer Reports of dealership network experience, and acts as a bellwether as to how a brand is performing while facing the consumer.
As such, the PSI takes into account a mixture of “mystery shopper” experiences along with actual sales success for each brand, thus giving a mixture of subjective and objective measurement for a company’s dealer network.
This is the third year a row that Pied Piper has ranked Ducati as its top brand (its Ducati’s 10th year in the Top 3), and its easy to see why. Ducati focuses on pushing dealerships into single-line businesses, which allows the OEM to tightly control the dealer experience for consumers.
Ducati unit sales have also been increasing year-over-year, and while much of that recent growth is due to the Scrambler line, and thus calls into question how strong those sales truly are, one cannot deny the per-unit volume increase that the Italian brand has been able to achieve.
Also a regular appearance at the top of the PSI, Harley-Davidson is another brand that has taken strong measures to cultivate unique, but also uniform, dealerships in its network.
Like the effort being made by Ducati, Harley-Davidson dealerships are often single-brand dealers that tap into the Bar & Shield culture.
Of note, this year marks the highest average score ever for the motorcycle industry on Pied Piper’s index, a sign that dealerships are evolving to be more effective at making sales. This year is also the first year that Zero Motorcycles was included on the PSI, with it earning an even 109 points, the same as the industry average.
Pied Piper says that Zero Motorcycles dealers we most likely to offer test rides and go over the unique features of their machines, but were also more likely to recommend another brand to a would-be buyer – the latter being an interesting critique of the brand.
While it is only correlative, Pied Piper says that when dealerships are ranked along their PSI score, the dealerships ranked in the top quarter sell 22% more bikes than the dealerships in the bottom quarter.
As always, the Pied Piper Prospect Satisfaction Index should give managers of OEM dealer networks something to chew on as they enhance and grow their dealer network. It is by no means a “be-all, end-all” metric on dealerships and brand networks, but it does provide an interesting data point in that regard.
Source: Pied Piper
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