No blog last week as we were in the midst of our virtual Spring Members’ Meeting (which worked well based on the feedback received), and returning to the keyboard now it would be tempting to focus on the immediate issues around the impact that Covid-19 is having on everyone – personally and from a business perspective.

Since the cancellation of the Geneva Show last week, there has been a lot of speculation about whether this will signify the end of motor shows. 

I was tempted to focus on “black swan” events for this week’s blog, given that I should now be on my way to the Geneva Show (cancelled) and the team are all working on the materials for our Spring Members’ Meeting (now converted into a virtual format as member companies’ travel policies are becoming restrictive).

ICDP has been challenging the value of overly-rigid customer-facing processes for some years. Real customer satisfaction is not about tick-box surveys that reflect someone’s idea of the perfect process and the things that matter, but how the customer actually feels following some interaction in a commercial process.

The last couple of weeks have given me plenty food for thought about different forms of distribution model, and in particular whether there is a “right” answer to the question of who is best placed to handle the customer interaction face to face, the role taken today in the vast majority of cases by franchised dealers.

I have spent the last few days at the NADA (the US dealers’ association) Show in the USA – always an efficient way to get a lot of meetings with friends and contacts from around the globe from only one trip, but also an opportunity to check what’s going on in the US. It’s not a market that in my view presents many benchmarks for distribution, but there are still some lessons to be learned, and innovations that may be transferrable.

The UK government’s recent announcement that it would bail out struggling regional airline FlyBe, regular carrier of the ICDP team on our flights to and from Birmingham, to the tune of £100 million, has inevitably been met with howls of protest from its immediate rivals. 

We are in the final editing stages of our “Aftermarket of Tomorrow” report which is the stage when you have to think about the “so what” after pulling together all the data and analysis. 

You may have seen the sad news last week that Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma” that laid out the theory of “disruptive innovation” had passed away at the age of only 67. 

In the ICDP workshop, I described our “clean slate” as what I would be looking at from the perspective of the start of the distribution channel, with the factory behind me, facing the challenge of how most effectively to make money from the 4,000 or so cars a week that might be coming off the production lines. 

Last year, ICDP conducted a piece of research examining the potential impact of Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) on a typical dealer’s repair and maintenance (R&M) activity at the 2025 horizon.

As everyone returns to work after the holiday period, it is firstly appropriate to wish everyone a Happy New Year, but also a natural time to think about what that year may bring for us all.  From a business perspective, some things seem to be known now.

One of the persistent disruptor stories of the last five years or so has been that Uber and other ride-sharing companies would replace individual car ownership, at least in metro areas, and particularly amongst the young.

There have been a few news stories recently about bans or restrictions on car use or ownership in a number of cities – bans on cars entering Delhi on alternate days, a proposed ban on all diesel cars entering the centre of Bristol, and a roll-out of car-free areas in specified parts of Barcelona.

At ICDP, we closely monitor all developments in automotive retail (the main focus being Europe), including the introduction of new formats and services on offer to customers.  A recurrent area of interest to us remains the operation of new and permanent retail formats (‘micro-outlets’) in high footfall locations such as shopping malls or shopping centres. 

We do not normally comment on specific companies in the industry, particularly where that includes subscribers to our research, but a number of people have asked about our views on the PSA-FCA merger, so it seems appropriate to share those more widely.  We have no inside knowledge, so these thoughts are based purely on public information.

Used cars are a key ingredient of retailing, and the most profitable market segment (combining both volumes and margins) is represented by the band between 36 and 50 months.

I had the pleasure last week to be in Brazil to report back to FENABRAVE and their members on our work there. Our detailed report will be released in due course, but the research itself and the discussions last week highlighted some opportunities that are worth reflecting on

At recent ICDP meetings, we have been tracking the ongoing process of reviewing and replacing the Block Exemptions, the European-level regulations which govern franchise distribution in the automotive and in other sectors, ahead of their expiry in 2022 and 2023.

Last week at our Autumn Meeting, my colleague Pascal Haubenreisser and I presented the next stage in our thinking on what a “clean slate” approach would look like for a car distribution network in the future, say the mid 2020s