Car Buying Behavior in the GCC

Dwindling automotive sales have been a trend across the region since 2016 and despite dealers slashing prices and introducing a flurry of new models, buyers haven’t quite given in to the desire of purchasing a new vehicle. Eager to understand the true picture, YallaMotor (the region’s largest automotive portal) conducted its very own survey and collected a whopping 3,943 responses to better understand car buying behavior in the GCC.

Most Popular Brands / Models

The first step to better understanding buyers and their preferences, was to find out which brands and models they were most interested in. With over 6,000,000 car buyers browsing more than 61,000,000 pages on YallaMotor during the months January to June, we were easily able to discover the brands and models that generated the most interest among the car buying community in the GCC.

Unsurprisingly, Toyota ranked in at first place and made up nearly double the audience of its closest competitor Hyundai, which came in second. Third position was taken up by Nissan, highlighting the top three brands to dominate the GCC market.

Zooming in to a model level, the Toyota Land Cruiser took prominent position as the most popular model in the GCC with its longstanding rival, the Nissan Patrol, coming in at a close second. Surprisingly, third position was also taken up by a Nissan, the funky Kicks.

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Most Popular Body Types

After discovering the brands and models that piqued the most interest, we wanted to discover more about our audience and their preferences. Out of the 6-million users that visited the website in the first two quarters of 2019, 1.33-million belonged to the in-market segment (in the final stages of the car purchasing cycle). Upon analyzing this segment of buyers, we discovered the three most popular categories by body type are Sedans, SUVs and Luxury Vehicles.

These results clearly indicate the GCC market’s preferences. SUVs and Luxury vehicles own a major slice of car sales (as evidenced by their overwhelming presence on the roads) but sedans, a breed that many manufacturers seem to be moving away from, is still a popular choice among buyers. Segments with far lesser interest include hatchbacks, pick-up trucks, mini vans, coupes, convertibles, and station wagons.

Information Sources

When questioned about their sources of information when purchasing a car, a whopping 67% of respondents cited online research as their main medium of information. What was even more interesting was that 34.92% claimed third-party/unbiased portals as their most trusted source when searching for information online.

The second most popular channel of information was what we’d term as “influencers”. It is worth noting that in this scenario “influencers” does not refer to celebrities with millions of followers on social media, but instead it consists of close family and friends whom car buyers trust the recommendations and opinions of.

Comparatively, we discovered that the impact and importance of traditional marketing mediums such as newspapers and magazines, TV and radio, are gradually decreasing.

Purchasing Time Frame

Since we had a better understanding of buyers’ sources of information, we wanted to dig deeper and get a clearer picture on their purchasing time frame. Essentially, our goal was to understand how long car buyers spend gathering information and making their final decision.

 What we discovered was that GCC car buyers displayed very different behavior when compared to car buyers in other territories. For instance, majority of GCC car buyers made their final decision in less than a month, whereas in other markets such as the U.S. or Europe, it traditionally takes buyers three times longer.

For a numerical breakdown, we identified 27.31% of buyers tend to make their final decision in less than ten days. 19.86% of buyers tend to make their decision between ten and twenty days, and just 17.42% of buyers make their decision in twenty to thirty days.

Showroom Experience

After collecting how car buyers do their research and how long it takes them to purchase their vehicle, we also wanted to better understand their experience while walking into showrooms and the elements that make for a pleasant sales journey.

A whopping 27.26% of respondents revealed they only visited the showroom once before purchasing their vehicle, while in comparison 22.77% of buyers visited the showroom twice. What we can decipher from these numbers is that buyers are a lot more prepared when walking into showrooms nowadays, having done their homework online using third-party websites.

As for the most important factors that make up a pleasant sales journey, buyers ranked Location, Working Hours, and Showroom Staff as the top three, followed by others such as Test Drive Opportunities and Showroom Ambiance.

Surprisingly, we also discovered that 31.12% of respondents claimed nobody from the showroom was in touch with them throughout the sales process and 27.44% claimed sales staff were in contact but only to some extent. This then has a direct relationship to the fact that less than 50% of car buyers would recommend the dealer their purchased their vehicle from to a friend.

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Chinese Brands

From what we see on the roads, there seems to be an increasing appetite for Chinese automobiles in the GCC. To better understand their interest share, we uncovered that Chinese brands captured a respectable 5.65% of interest share within the GCC car buying community. The most popular brand, MG Motor took first place, followed by Geely in second place, GAC Motor in third place, Changan in fourth place, and Chery in fifth place.