How do consumers purchase tires.

Most consumers view tires as expensive necessities to keep a vehicle in driving condition and will purchase them only when aware of their need for the tires. Among all tire buyers, 53% of them did not know what brand of the tires they purchase; All tire consumers can be grouped into 3 types: 1) 41% price-conscious consumers, treating tires as a commodity purchase 2) 18% quality-conscious consumers and 3) 23% value-conscious consumers, for both type 2) and 3) consumer, they select tires based upon the product quality – the five most important attributes are tread life, wet traction, handling, snow traction and dry traction. Across the segments, all consumers place high importance on price when making their purchase decision and expect to buy their tires on sale. Finally, most tires consumers go to small independent tires dealers and mass merchandisers buying tires, which account for 40% and 23% sales individually.

What Strategic roles did Aquatred play

 Why Aquatred is different?

Aquatred is a tire with unique value proposition on wet traction performance, which differentiates it from tires in the replacement tire market. According to the performance test, cars equipped with Aquatreds traveling at 55 miles per hour stopped in as much as two-car-lengths-less distance than similar cars equipped with conventional all radials.

 Re-branding the Goodyear tires into a high-performanced image

With the premium value proposition - outperformed wet traction, Aquatred plays a marketing strategy role to convert the Goodyear brand image from price-leverage brand into innovation-leverage brand, and further enable Goodyear to gain shares in the high performance tires market. Though Goodyear had a strong track in launching innovative products and had made large investment (over $ 1.5 million) to produce tires, its tires still