It doesn’t get any better downwards, there is talk of women taking their brother or father with them to buy a new car. And this in view of the fact that about a quarter of all vehicle owners in Germany are now women. While they are generally satisfied with the technical model offering, suggestions for improvement are aimed at greater practicability. Wishes also remain unfulfilled with regard to the communicative, social approach in advertising, sales and in the workshop.
The age distribution of female vehicle owners shows that women from the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation and women from the ‘Golf Generation’ have the highest rates of owning their own vehicle. The steadily increasing number of women holding a driver’s license also proves the trend that the purchase of cars is foreseeably a matter of course.
This should be taken to heart in the marketing and sales offices of the manufacturers and the needs of female drivers should not be ignored. They show that old prejudices do not apply: women are interested in cars, and they see opportunities to improve the car and, above all, the car sales and workshop service for them.
In the results of various surveys, the result is that the women surveyed, most of whom are working, use their cars particularly often. At the same time, the joy of the car and the associated mobility is very pronounced among women. And these women regularly buy new cars, decide mostly on their own about the model they choose, and trust themselves to have a significantly higher level of competence and a sure judgement when one compares the importance of individual parameters with those of the other female drivers surveyed.
Women’s demands are high
An assessment of individual satisfaction according to the school grading scheme, which has been common with the German Customer Barometer for many years, shows that the women surveyed still perceive a lack of respect, empathy and honesty on the part of the salesperson. The women surveyed also react with dissatisfaction to the lack of female staff in the car trade.
Electric car marketing neglects women
An increased focus on women in the marketing of electric cars could probably significantly accelerate the spread of this alternative drive type. This is what researchers from the University of Sussex in England and the Danish University of Applied Sciences Aarhus found out in a recent study.
According to the scientists, well-educated female car buyers are a potentially lucrative target group that has hardly been tapped so far. Their analysis showed that women – compared to male drivers – usually show a greater awareness of environmental issues and fuel efficiency.
Women are the new China
Women make up half of the world’s population, and without them nothing works in the car business. “Women are the new China,” the then Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche clairvoyantly recognized as early as 2015; if you are able to benefit from the female customers as well as from the male ones, the potential is much greater than that of the Middle Kingdom.
“Women are the fastest-growing customer group in the world,” Kerstin Heiligenstetter also knows, adding that more than 80 percent of luxury spending – including car spending – is influenced by women. Heiligenstetter heads the “She’s Mercedes” initiative, a platform that specifically addresses women’s mobility needs.
Women and the Car: A Success Story from the Beginning
Our social change includes all social and economic areas of our society. This is also the case in the automotive industry, where six women and five men will be represented on the supervisory board of General Motors (GM) in the future. The CEO is a woman: Mary Barra. In addition to Renata Jungo Brüngger (Compliance), Britta Seeger is the second woman to join the eight-member Board of Management of Daimler AG as a member of the Board of Management.
And without these energetic women, there would probably be neither the Mercedes brand nor the Daimler Group today: it was Bertha Benz who proved in 1888 with her courageous 100-kilometre journey from Mannheim to Pforzheim that her husband Carl’s invention worked. It was also Lina Daimler who cared for Gottlieb, who had a heart condition, and kept him energetic. In the end, it was Mercedes Jellinek, daughter of the Austrian merchant Emil Jellinek, on whose first name the trademark “Mércèdes” was registered in 1902.
