Srinivasan on Car-Buying Personalities:
Nitpickers, Tightwads and Snobs

By Ashley Warren

When it comes to buying a car, are you a nitpicker, a tightwad or a snob?

Marketing Associate Professor Raji Srinivasan, who researches how product design relates to the U.S. automotive industry, explained her Total Product Design (TPD) theory to a group of McCombs undergraduates Sept. 18 as part of the Faculty Research Presentation Series.

The TPD concept says that the combination of three elements influence car buying tendencies: functionality, aesthetics and meaning.

Functionality, Srinivasan said, relates to car features and benefits such as fuel efficiency. Aesthetics includes sensorial characteristics like body styles, appearance and finish. Meaning incorporates brand personality and user community characteristics.

“Much of what marketing does is to create meaning for users,” Srinivasan said.

While formulating her TPD theory, Srinivasan made two assertions that she then went on to attempt to prove. The first is that the three elements—functionality, aesthetics and meaning—come together to affect a customer’s experience with the product. And second, that experience is going to be different across different consumer groups.

Srinivasan then tested her two hypotheses using a J.D. Power and Associates Vehicle Quality Survey (VQS), which measures customer satisfaction.

The results showed that car buyers fall into one of three categories. Nitpickers, constituting 26 percent of customers, have moderate incomes and look for economy and safety, but not image, in a car. These buyers tend to have many complaints following the purchase of their new cars.

Tightwads, only 3 percent of customers, lean toward being environmentally conscious and frugal with their money. They seek economy, safety and reliability in a vehicle and are more likely satisfied with their purchases.

The majority of customers, 71 percent, are snobs when they search for cars. Members of this group have higher incomes, focus on the image of a car and overall are moderately pleased with their purchases.

“Most of us appear to be snobs when it comes to cars because the kind of car we drive makes some sort of statement about us,” Srinivasan said.

The VQS validated her hypothesis that the elements of product design have different effects on customers.

Offering a concise metaphor to explain the results, Srinivasan said, “It’s almost like you put it through a sieve and look at the design and customer satisfaction. You shake this through the statistical model, and they fall separately into different segments.”

In many industries, competing companies excel at a certain element of product design, like functionality, and must further differentiate their products by focusing on aesthetics or meaning.

One such example is Harley-Davidson, which takes the emphasis on aesthetics to another level. “The sound of the Harley-Davidson bike, they attempted to copyright it. You can go to Google and type ‘Harley-Davidson bike sound,’ and there’s an audio file of that on the Web,” Srinivasan said. “Essentially, what they were trying to do was think about the aesthetics as beyond the looks.”

When a car starts to look like every other car on the road, customers want points of differentiation. Engineers, designers and marketing agencies must continually adapt to add distinguishing features to their cars.

For instance, product designers at BMW concentrate on how the doors of these luxury vehicles shut, hoping customers will notice the attention to detail.

“If everyone achieves parity there, you go to the next point of differentiation,” Srinivasan said, emphasizing the role customers play in the process of product design. “Companies create these marketing plans, but we as consumers provide meaning. We determine the effects of products, what’s cool and not cool, so what happens to marketers? They lose control of their design at some level.”

In other words, when it comes to buying cars, customers can afford to be snobs.