Honda's alleged new car sales momentum is wrong

Honda Australia has finally parted ways with reality. Here's what happens when the facts don't matter in corporate communications and marketing...

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The Australian car industry is so damn competitive - just ask Honda - no sales quarter is a given, that’s what makes it so entertaining.

Honda, of course, is very concerned about Mazda’s recent almost-triumphant 2022 CX-5 press release about doing almost nothing. 

Honda, it seems, couldn’t bear letting those Mazda marketing samurai steal bullshit press release limelight. After all, in my view, Honda has worked hard and laid the foundations for their spectacular news. Are you ready for it?

Here’s what Honda desperately needed to tell the public:

I’ve had ‘joy’ and, frankly, a $47,000 Civic is emphatically not an example of that. Nobody pays almost $50,000 for a sedan anymore. The heyday of Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon are long dead, remember?

Anyway, the facts: Honda Australia supplied this helpful graph of its alleged momentum acquisition:

That’s very useful, except when you look at the actual data, in full. 

Honda’s graph, accompanying its disgraceful spin, shows sales from July to December 2021. July, of course marked the date they cancelled their dealer network, and invoked the Honda Shit Price Promise, also known as the ‘agency model’.

And it does look like a recovery, doesn’t it? Superficially…

Until the point where a horribly outspoken motoring journalist, who actually studied applied mathematics at university, chose to highlight some other, closely related sales data, you know, for context.

The red line is Honda’s bullshit press release graph. I’m using Professor Frankfurt’s bullshit bible for guidance on what constitutes bullshit. 

The blue line is the corresponding sales data for 2020. And 2020 was a cataclysm for Honda.

The Honda brand’s 2021 performance is a disaster, at least as I see it. Every month on that graph, from June to December inclusive, Honda had previously sold roughly twice as many cars in 2020 - the year immediately before they invoked the Shit Price Promise.

Translation: sales have fallen off a cliff. That blue line is a disaster.

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What Honda’s sales suggest

Trying to paint this upward trend, which is roughly the same trajectory as the year before, as a win, is just indefensible bullshit. Same trajectory; but half as many Hondas actually getting sold.

This is not what a win looks like. It’s just not. But they did try to spin it that way.

Stephen Collins there, speaking for Honda Australia, doing his best to keep the good ship Honda afloat, Down Under - respect.

Speaking of respect, for the facts that is, when he said “resulted in more sales contracts signed”, let’s examine that. More sales contracts compared to when, exactly.

Honda’s 2021 sales were below average, especially in comparison with 2020, before the Honda Shit Price Promise came into effect. 

In addition, 2020 Honda sales were even worse than 2019. And 2019 was worse for Honda than 2018. And here’s the broader context missing from this press release.

I think you’d agree, there’s a certain overall consistency in play here, over the last five years

Honda Australia sold 51,000 cars in 2018 - not bad. That figure fell 17 per cent in 2019, to 43,868 sales. Then, in 2020 sales nose-dived again, by 34 per cent down to about 29,000 sales. And then 17,562 last year, with the Shit Price Promise debut. That’s almost 40 per cent down, year-on-year.

This is not what sales success looks like, in my view, or many other business execs in fact. In fact, to Mr Collins I would respectfully say that Honda Australia has lost two-thirds of its sales in the space of just four years (inclusive). 2018 to 2021. That’s a disaster, with no evidence of improvement.

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Yeah, except nobody cares what the conversion rate is. When you’re selling only one third of the cars you were selling in 2018, before the Shit Price Promise, that’s not considered a win.

Frankly, this Honda missile’s trajectory appears to be locked on the Marianas Trench. 

So I think it’s high time for Honda Australia to be honest and start respecting the facts in its public communications.

Things aren’t going right and resources might be better spent fixing the problem, rather than trying to sell flawed data.

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