Toyota Motor Corp. has expanded their manufacturing as they moved into the United States. They are sharing a factory with Mazda Motor Corp. in Alabama. This begs the question, what brought them to this supply chain decision? Toyota, a Japanese motor company, has built cars for over 80 years, and they are just moving factories into the country with their most customers. I will focus on how this supply chain decision affects the customer’s preference matrix.<\/p>\n
For the consumer, decisions are made based on order qualifiers and order winners. Order qualifiers are\u00a0all the variables the customer considers while buying a good or service, but the order winner is the highest weighted variable of the order qualifiers. In the car market, customers look for order qualifiers that range from color of the car to the country the car was manufactured in. There has been a recent trend in which the product\u2019s country of origin is a focal point in the buying process of US customers. \u201cIn a speech Wednesday in Alabama, Toyota President\u00a0Akio Toyoda\u00a0said Alabama laid the groundwork to create \u2018another made-in-America success story,\u2019” and the President said, \u201cthe two auto makers’ new Alabama factory are a sign that \u2018companies are coming back to the U.S. in a very big way.\u2019\u201d Japan and other foreign countries have been tagged with developing employee unions and new government regulations. Car manufacturers move their production overseas for the lower costs and, in turn, cheaper prices for customers and higher margins. But Americans are more willing to pay for a car built in their home country than ever before, and this is a man reason Toyota, among other car manufacturers, are moving into the United States.<\/p>\n
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Does this make the country of the car\u2019s origin the order winner? Does it beat out qualifiers like safety, gas mileage, etc.? I would argue no, but customers are sacrificing a higher price to buy an American made car. \u201cThe big three, General Motors Co., Ford Motors Co., and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, are being outsold by non-U.S. rivals, as their share of American sales dwindled to 44% in 2017.\u201d This is a product of foreign car manufacturers like Toyota moving a portion of their manufacturing to the United States and taking advantage of an order qualifier for customers. Traditionally American made car companies have used their domestic manufacturing in marketing for decades. It\u2019s hard to determine what weight the customers in the car market put on domestic manufacturing, but the advertising and recent statistics show that there is a structural difference between foreign and American cars in the minds of customers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In short, Toyota and other foreign car manufacturers have moved some manufacturing to the US for financial and strategic reasons. There are many factors for each individual car buying customer. It\u2019s difficult to determine where domestic manufacturing ranks among the order qualifiers in the car market. The current decrease in sales for the Big Three American made car companies as foreign car manufacturers have moved factories to the United States shows that although it may not be an order winner, domestic manufacturing is a determining factor for consumers across the United States while buying a car. These are questions I asked myself while reading about the trends in motor company supply chains: how much weight do customers put on domestic manufacturing? What order qualifiers\/order winners do you think of when buying a car, and how does that compare with others in America?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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