Skip to main content

RCA Works In Marketing Too.

(RCA: Root Cause Analysis.)

I blogged here about Hyundai offering nervous consumers a "no harm, no foul" right to return a new car within 12 months of purchase if the buyer loses a job and is unable to make payments.

Today, the news reports are full of carmakers' plunging sales except for Subaru (sales up 8%) and, you guessed it, Hyundai (sales up 14%).

Domestic and several foreign manufacturers - even Honda and Toyota - talk as if a turnaround is mostly out of their hands. They're in the "wishing and hoping" category - wishing and hoping for sales to stabilize or at least fall more slowly, for a bailout to arrive, for a few more months breathing room, anything. Sales, meanwhile, are in the tank.

Hyundai, on the other hand, stayed home from Washington and got after it, responding directly to the ROOT CAUSE of customers' concerns: fear of job loss.
Lo and behold, sales are up 14%.

Go figure. Maybe this stuff works after all.


Did I mention Hyundai's sales are up 14%?
Root cause. You get that, right?


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor

"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information

Are the "Apocaholics" Wrong?

Will society avoid collapse and continue prospering? Yes, thanks to the innovators among us says zoologist and Economist editor Matt Ridley in his new book "The Rational Optimist." "...with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, (expect) bottom-up innovators to prevail. (Ridley's) prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.” We could still screw things up.  We could, for example, stifle innovation and trade while inflating the importance of restrictive bureaucracies. "Our progress is unsustainable...only if we stifle innovation and trade, the way China and other empires did in the past. Is that possible? Well, European countries are already banning technologies based on the preca