On May 5 the UAW struck GM’s Fairfax assembly plant in Kansas City, which makes the hot-selling Chevrolet Malibu sedan. The strike comes at a particularly inopportune time as a prolonged work stoppage could severely hurt the tremendous momentum Malibu has built up since its launch in October.

Since launching in Q4, Malibu demand has soared to new highs, surpassing all other models market-wide in January. Record demand has also driven sales to new highs, reaching 16,879 units in April, putting constraints on inventory as supplies remained tight at 36 days. While demand has declined over the past two months it has remained 3 times higher compared to its level last year and it continues to be one of the most shopped models market-wide.

In April, Malibu conversion, defined as the ratio of sales to demand, hit 22%, more than double that of its peak launch demand in January. Malibu conversion has not been this strong since its incentive-laden sell down in Q3 2007. This improvement can be attributed to increased supplies of the new model. It also makes Malibu conversion competitive with segment leaders Camry and Accord.

Maintaining launch momentum in the face of a strike is critical and requires informed decision making. A prolonged strike may further constrain inventory at a time when supplies need to fall in line with vehicle demand. On top of that, the new Malibu continues to attract significant interest from import shoppers who have increasingly put Malibu on their list of vehicles to shop. Even the slightest hiccup could jeopardize Malibu’s momentum and put to the brakes on what has been one of GM’s most successful launches.

What can GM do? The strike will test GM’s mettle and ability to keep the momentum rolling. Chevrolet must continue its marketing support of Malibu to ensure robust demand once the strike is settled and supplies return to more acceptable levels. If demand falls when inventories return, heavy incentives will be a part of any solution to drive sales.

In the short term, Chevrolet can redirect some Malibu shoppers into Impala. The number of people shopping both models has increased to record highs in 2008. To keep these prospects from defecting to import rivals, Chevrolet should develop programs that incentivize dealers to redirect Malibu shoppers into Impala if the prospect is a defection risk. Better to keep them in the family than to lose them altogether.

On Monday, the Energy Information Association released its latest gas price data; the U.S. price at the pump (all grades) stood at $3.51 at the end of April, the highest price on record. The conversation surrounding oil prices and the economy has made the price of gas a hot topic across political debates and fuel economy a component of recent automotive campaigns.

Does the price of gas actually run the engine of automotive interest in the US? If you sell compact cars it sure does. Compete tracked monthly shopping, or demand, for the compact car segment and compared it to the monthly U.S. weighted average gasoline (all grades) prices over recent months. Compete measures in-market demand by looking across all popular 3rd-party sites and aggregates unique shopping behavior by observing how many people actually utilize shopping tools for every make and model.

Compete also compared demand and gas prices for the most popular hybrid and best-known fuel-efficient compact car, the only U.S. model to exclusively offer every trim as a hybrid: the Toyota Prius. It appears, and not surprisingly so, that shopping spikes and falls coincident with gas prices.

Since launching, the Prius has been synonymous with fuel efficiency and hybrid fervor. April marked the highest shopper count total for Prius on record. Prius was the 4th most shopped model in the U.S. in April, when it had over 124,000 shoppers in that month alone. To put that in perspective, 124,000 shoppers was more than the entire shopper total for more than 25 other makes. In other words, more people shopped for a Prius than for all BMW models combined. Prius had more shoppers than the Lexus brand had in total despite the recent Lexus “power of h“ hybrid featured ad campaign. More people shopped for Prius than for Chrysler, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Pontiac or GMC to drive the point a little further down the road.
Prius outperformed all models combined (from a unique count, a person could have shopped for more than one model within a make) for the above-mentioned makes and in doing so outperformed the entire make demand for more than 70% of all major makes selling cars or trucks in the U.S. today. Does Prius deserve to be its own make with a portfolio of models that sell off of the fuel-efficient brand promise?

Prius has demonstrated that the right message at the right time works. Better fuel economy messaging works when gas prices peak for compact cars, and Prius has the hook consumers are willing to fish for in a compact car segment that is growing. I haven’t met many people that expect a severe decline in gas prices in the future, which would lead me to conclude that Prius is destined for yet more attention and subsequent success. Could the Prius brand extend across a wider range of products? I think it could. It certainly has enough attention from consumers at the moment to share shoppers across more models.

I’m still gloating about winning my March Madness pool – Rock Chalk Jayhawk! Yes, I was glued to the TV during all games… yet, I can’t remember one single ad that aired. It’s sad for marketers really, if I was in fact who they were trying to reach; a college sports enthusiast! Which got me wondering… How much is typically spent on advertising during March Madness?

TV Ad sales projected by TNS were to be around $545 million. “As a sports marketing event, the collegiate basketball tournament is part of a Final Four alongside the Super Bowl and the Summer and Winter Olympics,” said Jon Swallen, SVP of research at TNS Media Intelligence.

And who are the biggest spenders? Well, apparently General Motors has consistently been the top TV advertiser in the tournament, spending an average of $70 million annually during the past five years. So what did GM get for the money?

Using Compete’s Search Analytics Select we created a segment of people called “college sports enthusiasts”. We found that referrals from search engines (MSN, Yahoo!, Google) to Pontiac.com and Chevrolet.com for this segment did increased significantly in March…

Good. The advertising worked… sort of. Increased traffic to Pontiac and Chevrolet doesn’t necessarily mean that it was worth it for GM to spend all those millions - unless of course the quality of the traffic generated was somehow better than before.

Looking at how involved those college sports enthusiasts were on Pontiac and Chevrolet indicates that visitors to both sites were considered more ‘engaged’ in March. Engagement is defined as: use of one of the following tools - Locate a Dealer, Build Your Own, Request a Quote, or Payment Estimator. That being said, conversion, on both Pontiac and Chevrolet’s sites not only reached 13-month highs in March but also outpaced other manufacturers like Dodge, Ford, and Jeep.

What does all of this mean for GM? Well, it seems like the advertising did a good job of attracting people to these two sites. And the quality of the people visiting the sites was better than usual. All’s good, right? Well, for Pontiac at least.

According to Autodata, Pontiac sales were up 6% in March but Chevrolet sales were down 1%. Chevy’s decline was driven by the truck segment, which is being hurt by high gas prices, so there’s more of a story there, but enough for now….

For all of the golf enthusiasts out there, particularly in New England, nothing gets the blood pumping like warmer temps, melting snow and green grass. Another “unofficial” season kick-off is upon us as well — The Masters – with first round coverage beginning April 10th. For me and my group of golfing buddies this tournament has always been a great motivator for getting over the winter doldrums.

Also, if you’re like me, you probably spend many weekend afternoons watching live coverage of the weekly PGA events. And as with any of these events you can’t help but be inundated with various television ads or company logos on the apparel, bags and golf balls of the players. Between the PGA tour and the players themselves the public is exposed to literally hundreds of companies throughout a television broadcast. This year The Masters Tournament will have its traditional sponsors — AT&T, IBM and ExxonMobil — but in an effort to expand globally Masters Chairman Billy Payne announced a new group of sponsors designed to help promote the tournament internationally. The top three are ESPN, which will provide live 1st and 2nd round television coverage for two days, as well as Rolex and Mercedes- Benz.

From the list of sponsors the one that struck me the most was Mercedes-Benz, since week after week, television viewers are flooded with Tiger Woods-backed Buick ads. While one might argue Buick is effectively reaching a large sub-segment (over 60) of the golfing world, one cannot deny the influx of a younger generation into the sport. Also, my visits to local golf courses and country clubs lately tell me that golfers are driving luxury brand vehicles rather than “Dad’s old Buick.” That’s not to say Buick is the only automotive sponsor of the PGA - for many years now Cadillac has been at the forefront of the sponsorship stage within the PGA. Through television ads and the sponsorship of one of golf’s favorite players, Fred Couples, Cadillac has carved out its niche in the PGA. But this makes sense to me because Cadillac not only fits within the older generation, but also recent marketing campaigns by Cadillac have focused more on the younger generation of car buyers.

However, if this really is the case, do Cadillac and recently announced sponsor Mercedes-Benz resonate better among golf enthusiasts or does golfing superstar Tiger Woods help Buick lead the pack among the golfing community? In fact, golf enthusiasts are 5 times more likely to visit a Buick website than the average online consumer and 2-3 times more likely to visit a Mercedes or Cadillac site respectively (data gathered using Behavior Match).

This is especially noticeable as we get closer to golf’s largest event – The Master’s — where Buick shows a large spike. So it appears that Buick, while maybe not the brand that fits the stereotypical view of a golfer, has the golfing recipe for success; host two of your own PGA tournaments (The Buick Invitational and the Buick Open) and have the world’s most recognizable sports figure back your brand.

How green are you? My personal answer to that question is, not very. I took the “Green IQ” test on greeniq.com and scored 23 out of 100. I guess simply changing to energy efficient light bulbs and appliances are considered baby steps. I really need to start leaving my V8 in the garage and start walking or pedaling to the grocery story with my eco-friendly reusable grocery bags in tow…or….perhaps I could consider one of the many new hybrids several manufacturers have made available to ease my “not-so-green” mind.

Import manufacturers made it possible for consumers to purchase their green auto as early as 2000 – it has taken a bit longer for the domestics to catch up, but they are here and they include Large Pickups and Full-Size SUV’s. The question is, are they succeeding at drawing environmentally conscious consumers to their websites? We took a look at the 7.6 million visitors in the month of January that we categorize as “Environmentally Conscious” to see which brand websites they were most likely to visit and here is what we found.

On average (among brands shown below), each of the brand sites only had 97,000 consumers among the 7.6 million actually visit in January. If you are looking for a rich concentration of these environmentally conscious consumers among those brands, Saturn wins. You are 2.5 times more likely to see a green consumer on Saturn.com as you are the internet in general. However, if you measure success based on the “number” of unique green consumers that visit a brand website – Honda takes the prize. In January, among the 7.6 million consumers, 238,000 of them also visited Honda.com. Falling short among the competition was Chrysler, Nissan and Dodge – coincidentally newcomers to the hybrid arena.

So what does the reverse look like? Which environmentally conscious websites are automotive prospects most likely to visit?

One site stands out among all brand browsers: fueleconomy.gov, where consumers can coincidentally get the entire list of available hybrid vehicles by manufacturer and determine if there is a tax credit available should you make the investment.

Browsers from the majority of brands visit hybridcars.com – Toyota leads the pack for this particular website. GMC browsers are more likely to be found visiting treehugger.com; Chrysler browsers, though few in number that actually visit an environmentally conscious website, will more likely be found on motherearthnews.com.

Overall, automotive browsers do not generally visit Environmentally Conscious websites – out of the 106 tracked by Compete, browsers of the brands shown above visit an average of only 7 sites. I, with my poor Green IQ score of 23, have visited none of these sites… until now. As car manufacturers offer more choices among vehicles that have a hybrid option beyond that of compact or mid-size cars, perhaps more consumers will jump on the green bandwagon. Time will certainly tell.

While looking at Boston.com the other day it was impossible not to notice the main headlines — gold has reached record highs, the dollar continues to fall against foreign currencies, the market is down big-time and of course, gas prices continue to climb to record levels with some analyst speculating $4/gallon by this summer. Every day we read different articles about how to save at the pump. From fuel saving due to what some call “hypermiling,” meaning to drive your vehicle in such a way to achieve as much as 100 miles/gallon or more, to becoming more thrifty at the supermarket in order to retain more money for the growing gas prices, one can’t help but be affected.

This got me thinking… With all the focus on fuel savings and more and more car companies launching hybrid models, the top tier luxury/supercar brands must be taking a bath. Well in fact, the opposite is true. Lamborghini, Bentley and Rolls-Royce have not only shown significant increases in online activity but also achieved record sales last year. Bentley sales were just over 10 thousand units, up 7% year-over-year. Lamborghini was up 15% year-over-year with slightly more than 2,400 units sold. And Rolls-Royce showed the most improvement year-over-year, up 25% with 1,010 units sold.

Apparently the demand for these vehicles is only increasing. In the U.S., Lamborghini’s largest market, they have more than doubled their number of dealerships in less than two years from 14 to 30. At the same time Rolls-Royce and Bentley continue to break into new markets with great success. 2007 marked Bentley’s first year in the Korean market selling 100 cars.

So while most of us are worried about the possibility of a recession or even depression and constantly complaining while experiencing the much overused phrase “Pain at the Pump,” there is obviously a select group willing to shell out large sums of money for one of these high end, gas guzzling automobiles. With sales at record highs and website traffic increasing dramatically monthly and annually it’s nice to see at least some of us get to drive a supercar!