Why is ISUZU winning the COVID-19 war
in Thailand?

During the pandemic the automotive industry saw an overall slump in sales and production across the world that reduced total sales in Thailand by roughly 22% from 2019 to 2020. While most automakers struggled to maintain their total units sold, ISUZU managed to increase their sales numbers by 9% to a historic high.

ABeam Consulting conducts periodic Customer Behavior market studies for the Thai market, designed specifically to focus on the most influential factors for choosing a car brand and how it relates to the overall customer journey. With a representative data set across all major economic hubs in Thailand and three major car segments; Luxury, passenger and pick-up, ABeam matched ISUZU’s latest success story with its own customer insights.

ISUZU levarages the main influential factors identified by ABeam in line with Thai customer behavior, specifically for the pick-up segment. Timing for the latest product was a favorable factor, but also its pricing strategy that meets the current need of the market played a substantial role. Due to the lost jobs in the pandemic, customers required pick-up trucks to start new businesses and were looking for low front-end investments. Despite being more expensive over a 5 year period, ISUZU offered a pricing scheme that made them the cheapest during the start of the new business to keep cost as low as possible, but with a higher end price that can be paid off easily by an expected economic upturn or success in the newly established business.

ABeam can support distributors and OEMs who manage their own nationwide dealer networks to identify those influential factors early through solutions like ABeam DRIVE that provides its users with a tool to easily and quickly collect data from customer interactions, increasing data visibility to adjust campaigns, processes and more.