The Tire Rack uses the web to drive beyond core market of car enthusiasts
The Tire Rack has long catered to car enthusiasts who care a great deal about the performance level of tires. Now it’s using the web to leverage its customers’ knowledge to help design products that customers want and broaden its market reach with the general tire-buying public. "The web is truly becoming a great source of new customers for us," Matt Edmonds, vice president of marketing, tells Internet Retailer.
In business since 1979, The Tire Rack started out serving high-performance car owners who often had difficulty finding the right tires for their vehicles. It initially processed sales through a call center with leads coming through a paper catalog and magazine ads. It has since built up a multi-channel strategy that includes more than 3,200 recommended installers and a web site that went live in 1996.
Tire Rack has been garnering customer feedback on the tires it sells since 1995, when it started surveying customers in mailed paper forms distributed with its catalogs three times a year. But it expanded its surveying to a nearly constant basis after building an e-commerce web site in 1998 through e-mailed customer-satisfaction surveys following each order. Online and call center orders are most often shipped to tire-installing shops, but some customers purchase tires mounted and balanced on new rims for home delivery.
Because Tire Rack’s customers tend to be fanatics about tires and motor vehicles, it has been easy to get them to participate in surveys, Edmonds says. "That’s what’s wonderful about all this, we don’t have to provide an incentive to get customers to give us feedback," he says.
As customers respond to e-mailed surveys, they click a link in the e-mail message that takes them to a survey form on TireRack.com, where data including customer ratings of their tires, plus their vehicle’s mileage, make and year, are automatically compiled in a database. The consumer ratings are based on questions regarding customers` perceived quality and performance of their tires, to which they designate the level of quality or performance by clicking on numbers on a scale of 1 to 10.
The data, which are processed in a software program Tire Rack developed in-house, are presented in real-time to visitors on TireRack.com who are researching how well particular tires have been known to perform on particular types of vehicles, Edmonds says. "We have over 60,000 customers who have given us completed surveys, representing over 1.3 billion miles of driving information," he says.
Additional information garnered from written comments from customers is viewed and analyzed by two Tire Rack staffers, who place the comments on the web for public review along with other research.
Tire Rack markets its web site through a broad range of advertising and public relations efforts, including appearances at special community events and ads in national car magazines. That exposure, combined with the extensive research it`s able to gather and present through the web, is helping it build its customer base among the general public as well as car enthusiasts, Edmonds says.
But while the consumer feedback helps to build relationships with customers who come to TireRack.com to research consumer-generated information on the best tires for their vehicles, Tire Rack is now leveraging that feedback to also help its suppliers design better tires. It’s sharing the customer feedback with Cooper Tire & Rubber Co., which has used the data to develop its AVON Tyres USA line of tires that it will introduce to the U.S. market this spring. Tire Rack, which also does its own driving tests of tires at its South Bend, IN-based headquarters, will forward to Cooper customer feedback suggestions -- for instance, to make tires quieter and more comfortable as well as operate with high performance.
By bridging customer-expressed needs with actual tire designs, Edmonds says, Tire Rack expects to increase demand for the U.S. line of AVON tires, which will be distributed exclusively through Tire Rack. "One of our real strengths," Edmonds says, "is that we’ll be able to help create demand for the AVON brand."
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