Quote:
Originally Posted by Tcoat
How long have you worked for a major automotive company? I am on my third in the last 28 years and believe me they count every single penny. The Shareholders insist on getting every cent back that they can. It may seem like "pocket change" to change every part on one car but they make millions of cars a year. One individual vehicle means NOTHING to them.
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This doesn't just apply to individuals, it applies to corporations as well. Over the past 20 years I've worked for 3 companies. One was an international company with 70,000 employees in just about every first and second world country. The second was a 40,000 employee company, primarily doing business in the US. The third (my current employer) is a regional company with about 3,200 employees.
The leadership of my current employer thinks like individuals buying cars. They think the vendors should bend to their every whim and expect to be treated as a "big deal". I have to remind them that with some companies they deal with they are a "big deal" but for others, such as Microsoft or Cisco or Apple, we are a very small rounding error in their financial statement. If we disappeared tomorrow as a customer the sales guy might notice but no one else would as they probably pick up and lose customers our size every day. I also remind them that the last two companies I worked for had more IT employees than my current employer has overall employees (they love that one...not).
Same thing with car buyers. Yes, to some extent loyalty is important to the local dealer, but probably not to the manufacturer. The manufacturers gain and lose thousands of customers every day. They also recognize that it is a very small portion of the car buying public that is brand loyal any longer. Frankly, I don't know anyone (except truck buyers who are staunchly loyal) who still buy the same model over and over. Heck, I've never bought the same make or model car back to back in my entire history of buying cars with the exception of two Chevy Astros that were the family travel vehicles and that wasn't out of loyalty as much as the second one was a steal of a deal at the time.