Everyone knows the elephant in the room.  Unfortunately the elephant does not know any of them.

I read Toyota’s US president has decided to change Toyota’s business strategy as a result of the latest JD Power rankings.  Even though Toyota regained the world-wide leadership in car sales on July 30, 2013, it did not have a single car listed in JD Power’s initial quality results across all body styles.

“Perhaps all of the other automobile manufacturers have discovered automotive’s secret sauce.  We sell more cars than anyone else, but what good is that if we do not meet Power’s criteria.  Sure our customers swear by us, but what do they know about cars?” Asked James Edsel. “They just want something that looks cool, has great speakers, and a USB connection.”

James continued by explaining, “We have decided to follow the strategy of the US healthcare industry.  Health systems thought they were doing pretty well with their understanding of their patients’ experiences until CMS came along with its HCAHPs ratings and told them how to really measure the entirety of patient experience.  Now hospitals can see what a tiny fraction of their patients actually thought of their care months back when they received it.  They can pay money for their own data, and hire people to make their numbers look better the next time they pay for their data.”

“After all, why rely on what all of your customers and prospective customers tell you when you can simply go to one source and have them tell us what they think we need to hear.  One report and someone else does all the work.”

I’ll leave it to you to decide if there is a workable analogy there. To be fair, I heard the analogy while speaking with someone yesterday who is way smarted than me.

JD Powers is a business.  It conducts market research based on customer surveys. It then sells the research to the automobile manufacturers.  The big difference is the automobile manufacturers are not forced to alter their business model to raise their scores.