Enhancing Promotional Strategies within Automotive Companies in Malaysia

Rapid growth of the economy and high purchasing power of its population have made Malaysia the largest passenger car market in ASEAN. With a ratio of 200 cars for every one thousand people, Malaysia ranks among the top countries with high car ownership ratio in the region. Toyota, Honda, KIA, BMW, Mercedes Benz, Volvo are some of the global automotive companies which have set up operations in Malaysia to take advantage of the buoyant consumer demand. Thus, the automotive companies in Malaysia have spent huge amount of money for promotional strategies in order to maintain their sales. To date, the companies have introduced various strategies such as ‘promotional mixed’ which are advertising, internet marketing, personal selling and public relation/publicity in accordance to changes in the consumers’ socio-economy, technology, and competition aspects. Nevertheless, the success of these strategies is vague. Therefore, this study aims to identify which promotional strategies have reached the consumer most and to determine to what extent these promotional strategies influence the consumers. Our model of study is based on AIDA concept and this model proposed that consumers respond to marketing messages in a cognitive (thinking), affective (feeling), and conative (doing) sequence. In addition, the population of the study is the consumers who purchase car in Malaysia. We strongly believe that the study will help the automotive companies in Malaysia to understand the so called “new” market and prepare them to be more competitive via promotional strategies.