R U in Acura's Demographic
10-01-2006, 09:22 PM
#1
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R U in Acura's Demographic
Are You in Acura's Demographic?
Small SUV is aimed at 30ish, aggressive, male city dweller
Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, October 1, 2006
Acura's RDX is designed to appeal to the man who is "edgy... Acura's RDX is designed to appeal to the man who is "edgy... Acura's RDX is designed to appeal to the man who is "edgy... Acura's RDX is designed to appeal to the man who is "edgy... More...
My colleague, Cnet's Wayne Cunningham, and I were comfortably tooling along in the new Acura RDX recently, zipping out Lombard Street toward the Golden Gate Bridge and a few hours of testing this new SUV offering from American Honda, Acura's corporate parent.
There wasn't much out of the ordinary in the road test or in the car itself. It's smaller than Acura's successful MDX and somehow more agile, zippier, no doubt because of its turbocharged 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine and its "super-handling all-wheel-drive," an RDX version of the same system on the RL sedan.
But people weren't lining the sidewalks and shouting, "Hey, is that Acura's new SUV? Pull over and let me see." In fact, the car is in showrooms now. But unlike Acura's legendary NSX sports car (now nearly 20 years old), the RDX's prosaic SUV shape is not the kind of design that would turn many heads.
What was different from many of the road tests we do, however -- what gave this test a kind of insight into Honda's way of doing things, of developing a car, of how they spend hundreds of millions of dollars before the thing is even seen by the public -- was the introduction an hour earlier, complete with PowerPoint presentation, of how Acura came up with the idea of the RDX in the first place and how it went about designing a car to follow, or conform to, that idea.
Honda was the first of the big three Japanese automakers to launch an upscale line in the United States to capture that ever-increasing market of people who are rich, people who think they are rich or people who want to look as if they're rich. Clearly, it's a fertile field. Honda came up with the Acura line 20 years ago and was quickly followed by Toyota (Lexus) and Nissan (Infiniti).
Acura fielded the Legend, in coupe and sedan form, then branched out with other types, including the TL, CL, Integra, RL, MDX and so on. The MDX bowed as a 2001 model and was Acura's only true sport utility. Now we're five years on and the MDX, a bit long in the tooth, is about to have a makeover. Time to bring in something new. Where to start?
To hear Acura tell the tale, as it did in an exhaustively researched presentation in San Francisco recently, the place to start is with an enormous amount of demographic, economic, cultural, attitudinal, sociological and every other kind of esoterica that can be dredged up by a big multinational outfit.
William Walton, Acura's product planner for the 2007 RDX, said that between 1990 and 2000, for example, "we found that people were moving back to cities. The big cities had an average 10 percent growth in that period." Acura decided to target the RDX at the market now occupied by BMW's X3, a smaller version of the X5 SUV and one that costs a bit more than the $32,000 to $38,000 the RDX is slated to cost.
Acura also found, no surprise, that in cities, space is at a premium, and so it made a smaller car -- it's actually a light truck or a taller station wagon or a crossover utility vehicle, depending on your affinity for the semantics of auto descriptions. And it found that owners of Acura's small RSX coupe (being phased out) were graduating to light trucks, further incentive to make a small SUV.
In the PowerPoint slides, Acura painted a specifically accurate (pardon the expression) picture of who it is that it wants to shell out nearly $40,000 for an optioned-up (only one option: the "technology package") RDX: the slide showed a 30ish white male talking on his cell phone and described him as "edgy, competitive, works hard, plays hard. Wants to impress peers/boss. Architect. Aggressive. Single, 30 (years old), actively dating. Degree from a high profile school. (Lives in) downtown loft apartment." He has a household income of about $100,000 a year.
He's part of "neo-urbanism," incorporating "an active 24-hour lifestyle," a sense of "creative expression" that prefers "avant garde/cutting edge," a way of living that "exposes neo-urbanites to multi-cultural communities (and) unique designs." These are people with an "adventurous spirit, seeking new and unique experiences, not satisfied with conventional thinking."
His weekday activities, carwise, are "negotiating downtown traffic, parking, etc." He pays attention to "connectedness with partners and clients." On the weekend, he's involved in "dating, clubbing, nightlife; mountain biking and skiing (and) snowboarding with the guys."
Gary Evert, the RDX's chief engineer, said that as part of Acura's research, "we conducted home visits in Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago" with people they considered their target audience. Among the things they discovered was the fact that "you need valet cachet when lunching with clients." The buyer would want a "stylish vehicle in the city," a car into which he could put a mountain bike on the weekend. (To that end, the RDX's rear compartment will hold two 19-inch mountain bikes, with their front wheels removed.)
That single, youngish male buyer who's dazzling mesmerized clients during the week and hurtling down Squaw Valley's KT22 on weekends will make up between 70 and 80 percent of the RDX's market, but there's also a secondary market of the "young family, 30-plus (years old), recently married, socializing; creative director for (an) ad agency, (whose) residence is a loft apartment/condominium."
The outside of the RDX is designed under the concept, Acura says, of an "urban running back," with "muscular body, dynamic arched roof, protective lower body, sharp edged lines. Athletic armor." The interior is supposed to connote "downtown loft, emotional, advanced."
Advertising for this seemingly well-adjusted little SUV, aimed at a tech-savvy audience, will include downloading images and information into the cell phones of curious potential customers who call in and request it.
After all that, I felt like I was hopping into a fragile test tube experiment, but, of course, it was simply a car and, yes, it turns out that it does work well and may well fill the bill for that prototypical 30-year-old downtown architect, living in his elegant loft.
Acura stresses that the car is not a smaller MDX, but more an outgrowth of the sportier TSX sedan. OK. Not worth arguing. In our four hours driving around Marin and Sonoma counties, we found that the car handles better than your normal SUV, in the sense that it has a neutral, sports-car-like feel on corners (attributable, in part, to the AWD system) and spurts well on the straightaways. I would have liked more power -- I'm used to turbocharged cars leaping ahead a bit more.
Inside, it has that Acura feel of enhanced Honda, more refined Honda, which should come as no surprise and is not a slam. It has big, readable dials and, with the optional technology package, all the modern electronics today's techie would want -- 10-speaker sound system designed by famed recording engineer Elliot Scheiner in conjunction with Panasonic; Bluetooth-enabled phone; electronic stability control; "real time" traffic-tracking (available in 31 U.S. metro areas, including the Bay Area) so you can confirm that, yes, you are in a traffic jam on U.S. 101 northbound at 5:03 p.m.; and navigation.
The funny thing about the RDX is that I wonder how differently I might have felt about the car had I not seen Acura's take on just who it is who will buy this thing. Riding in the car made me think a bit about the architect and his dashing off for a spot of nightlife, clubbing it up, being avant-garde and it did seem to fit.
On the other hand, the car seemed like a midsize SUV that worked fine and would be just as happy carrying a lawyer, a cop, a night-shift waiter, a steeplejack, a computer tech, a teacher, a statistician, a philosopher or, God forbid, even a reporter.
As long as they're all about 30 and live in a loft.
E-mail Michael Taylor at mtaylor@sfchronicle.com.
Small SUV is aimed at 30ish, aggressive, male city dweller
Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, October 1, 2006
Acura's RDX is designed to appeal to the man who is "edgy... Acura's RDX is designed to appeal to the man who is "edgy... Acura's RDX is designed to appeal to the man who is "edgy... Acura's RDX is designed to appeal to the man who is "edgy... More...
My colleague, Cnet's Wayne Cunningham, and I were comfortably tooling along in the new Acura RDX recently, zipping out Lombard Street toward the Golden Gate Bridge and a few hours of testing this new SUV offering from American Honda, Acura's corporate parent.
There wasn't much out of the ordinary in the road test or in the car itself. It's smaller than Acura's successful MDX and somehow more agile, zippier, no doubt because of its turbocharged 2.3-liter four-cylinder engine and its "super-handling all-wheel-drive," an RDX version of the same system on the RL sedan.
But people weren't lining the sidewalks and shouting, "Hey, is that Acura's new SUV? Pull over and let me see." In fact, the car is in showrooms now. But unlike Acura's legendary NSX sports car (now nearly 20 years old), the RDX's prosaic SUV shape is not the kind of design that would turn many heads.
What was different from many of the road tests we do, however -- what gave this test a kind of insight into Honda's way of doing things, of developing a car, of how they spend hundreds of millions of dollars before the thing is even seen by the public -- was the introduction an hour earlier, complete with PowerPoint presentation, of how Acura came up with the idea of the RDX in the first place and how it went about designing a car to follow, or conform to, that idea.
Honda was the first of the big three Japanese automakers to launch an upscale line in the United States to capture that ever-increasing market of people who are rich, people who think they are rich or people who want to look as if they're rich. Clearly, it's a fertile field. Honda came up with the Acura line 20 years ago and was quickly followed by Toyota (Lexus) and Nissan (Infiniti).
Acura fielded the Legend, in coupe and sedan form, then branched out with other types, including the TL, CL, Integra, RL, MDX and so on. The MDX bowed as a 2001 model and was Acura's only true sport utility. Now we're five years on and the MDX, a bit long in the tooth, is about to have a makeover. Time to bring in something new. Where to start?
To hear Acura tell the tale, as it did in an exhaustively researched presentation in San Francisco recently, the place to start is with an enormous amount of demographic, economic, cultural, attitudinal, sociological and every other kind of esoterica that can be dredged up by a big multinational outfit.
William Walton, Acura's product planner for the 2007 RDX, said that between 1990 and 2000, for example, "we found that people were moving back to cities. The big cities had an average 10 percent growth in that period." Acura decided to target the RDX at the market now occupied by BMW's X3, a smaller version of the X5 SUV and one that costs a bit more than the $32,000 to $38,000 the RDX is slated to cost.
Acura also found, no surprise, that in cities, space is at a premium, and so it made a smaller car -- it's actually a light truck or a taller station wagon or a crossover utility vehicle, depending on your affinity for the semantics of auto descriptions. And it found that owners of Acura's small RSX coupe (being phased out) were graduating to light trucks, further incentive to make a small SUV.
In the PowerPoint slides, Acura painted a specifically accurate (pardon the expression) picture of who it is that it wants to shell out nearly $40,000 for an optioned-up (only one option: the "technology package") RDX: the slide showed a 30ish white male talking on his cell phone and described him as "edgy, competitive, works hard, plays hard. Wants to impress peers/boss. Architect. Aggressive. Single, 30 (years old), actively dating. Degree from a high profile school. (Lives in) downtown loft apartment." He has a household income of about $100,000 a year.
He's part of "neo-urbanism," incorporating "an active 24-hour lifestyle," a sense of "creative expression" that prefers "avant garde/cutting edge," a way of living that "exposes neo-urbanites to multi-cultural communities (and) unique designs." These are people with an "adventurous spirit, seeking new and unique experiences, not satisfied with conventional thinking."
His weekday activities, carwise, are "negotiating downtown traffic, parking, etc." He pays attention to "connectedness with partners and clients." On the weekend, he's involved in "dating, clubbing, nightlife; mountain biking and skiing (and) snowboarding with the guys."
Gary Evert, the RDX's chief engineer, said that as part of Acura's research, "we conducted home visits in Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago" with people they considered their target audience. Among the things they discovered was the fact that "you need valet cachet when lunching with clients." The buyer would want a "stylish vehicle in the city," a car into which he could put a mountain bike on the weekend. (To that end, the RDX's rear compartment will hold two 19-inch mountain bikes, with their front wheels removed.)
That single, youngish male buyer who's dazzling mesmerized clients during the week and hurtling down Squaw Valley's KT22 on weekends will make up between 70 and 80 percent of the RDX's market, but there's also a secondary market of the "young family, 30-plus (years old), recently married, socializing; creative director for (an) ad agency, (whose) residence is a loft apartment/condominium."
The outside of the RDX is designed under the concept, Acura says, of an "urban running back," with "muscular body, dynamic arched roof, protective lower body, sharp edged lines. Athletic armor." The interior is supposed to connote "downtown loft, emotional, advanced."
Advertising for this seemingly well-adjusted little SUV, aimed at a tech-savvy audience, will include downloading images and information into the cell phones of curious potential customers who call in and request it.
After all that, I felt like I was hopping into a fragile test tube experiment, but, of course, it was simply a car and, yes, it turns out that it does work well and may well fill the bill for that prototypical 30-year-old downtown architect, living in his elegant loft.
Acura stresses that the car is not a smaller MDX, but more an outgrowth of the sportier TSX sedan. OK. Not worth arguing. In our four hours driving around Marin and Sonoma counties, we found that the car handles better than your normal SUV, in the sense that it has a neutral, sports-car-like feel on corners (attributable, in part, to the AWD system) and spurts well on the straightaways. I would have liked more power -- I'm used to turbocharged cars leaping ahead a bit more.
Inside, it has that Acura feel of enhanced Honda, more refined Honda, which should come as no surprise and is not a slam. It has big, readable dials and, with the optional technology package, all the modern electronics today's techie would want -- 10-speaker sound system designed by famed recording engineer Elliot Scheiner in conjunction with Panasonic; Bluetooth-enabled phone; electronic stability control; "real time" traffic-tracking (available in 31 U.S. metro areas, including the Bay Area) so you can confirm that, yes, you are in a traffic jam on U.S. 101 northbound at 5:03 p.m.; and navigation.
The funny thing about the RDX is that I wonder how differently I might have felt about the car had I not seen Acura's take on just who it is who will buy this thing. Riding in the car made me think a bit about the architect and his dashing off for a spot of nightlife, clubbing it up, being avant-garde and it did seem to fit.
On the other hand, the car seemed like a midsize SUV that worked fine and would be just as happy carrying a lawyer, a cop, a night-shift waiter, a steeplejack, a computer tech, a teacher, a statistician, a philosopher or, God forbid, even a reporter.
As long as they're all about 30 and live in a loft.
E-mail Michael Taylor at mtaylor@sfchronicle.com.
10-01-2006, 10:23 PM
#3
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I'd say I fit about 60% of that demographic. 26-year old filmmaker who is part of the Twixtor generation (young, urban professional who still lives at home). Hit the downtown nightlife on occasion and hit cottage country during the summer.
Most of my friends - young 20-something professionals with active-lifestyles - prefer to drive sedans (Accord, A4, Jetta, IS) and I would too....but I grew up driving SUVs and like visibility that comes with a higher ride...so the RDX seems pretty much the ideal car for me right now.
Most of my friends - young 20-something professionals with active-lifestyles - prefer to drive sedans (Accord, A4, Jetta, IS) and I would too....but I grew up driving SUVs and like visibility that comes with a higher ride...so the RDX seems pretty much the ideal car for me right now.
10-01-2006, 10:34 PM
#4
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Married and in mid 40's with two kids
Used to live in LA but escaped to the other extreme (KS).
Has graduate degree from national school.
Income of more than 150K.
Edgy but not active with social life and not living in a loft.
I love well-running machine, be it a lawm mower, boat or car but I do not push any machine anywhere near to the limit.
I guess I do not fall into that targeted group of buyers.
Used to live in LA but escaped to the other extreme (KS).
Has graduate degree from national school.
Income of more than 150K.
Edgy but not active with social life and not living in a loft.
I love well-running machine, be it a lawm mower, boat or car but I do not push any machine anywhere near to the limit.
I guess I do not fall into that targeted group of buyers.
10-01-2006, 10:38 PM
#5
nope....not in any way
I'm 38, female, with a job at a computer company in downtown...a house in the "suburbs", and a house full of dogs - permanent ones and fosters that are in need of new homes - that fill up my extra time!
Although I do have a tendancy to drive fast...
Although I do have a tendancy to drive fast...
10-02-2006, 08:19 AM
#6
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Early forties, male, SINK (single-income couple no kids), virtual office most of the time, condo near college town, MBA from ranked school. That demographic describes what used to be me! 
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10-02-2006, 05:20 PM
#8
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We're DINKS, but it will primarily be my vehicle and I don't really fit the demographic. Female, married, and live in the suburbs. I am a professional although not into active sports. The RDX suits our needs because it will provide us some additional cargo area for landscaping and home improvement projects, but still be fun to drive on a daily basis.
10-02-2006, 05:31 PM
#9
Originally Posted by Tonia
We're DINKS, but it will primarily be my vehicle and I don't really fit the demographic. Female, married, and live in the suburbs. I am a professional although not into active sports. The RDX suits our needs because it will provide us some additional cargo area for landscaping and home improvement projects, but still be fun to drive on a daily basis.
10-02-2006, 08:10 PM
#11
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25, Single, Male, SINK, Twixtor, Aggressive driver, Bachelor's from an expensive private university, renting a work-only photography studio in downtown, live 15 minutes away from downtown.
10-03-2006, 07:00 AM
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Originally Posted by Digits
Ditto for me, except I'm still waiting for my RDX
10-03-2006, 04:23 PM
#14
Originally Posted by Tonia
I'm still waiting on mine too. Dealer called yesterday and new anticipated delivery date is Oct 22
10-03-2006, 04:47 PM
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Originally Posted by Digits
What was the original delivery date? Mine was 9/28-10/2, but now "mid-October," no specific date. The reason was increased demand for the tech package.
10-03-2006, 09:55 PM
#16
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I am very much in the RDX demographic. Integra and CL owner the past 15 years. Waited on making a purchasing decision until the RDX came out. After driving a coupe for all my life, decided I wanted a small SUV. RDX just didn't do it for me, despite the very nice interior. Too much like my old coupes and I wanted to sit higher. A few other things in the RDX I really didn't like....style of the rear (looks weird IMO), didn't like how the back seats folded down, too small, and I think it's really overpriced. Went with a low mileage 02 RX 300 instead for ~15k less. Still interested in reading about the RDX impressions though.
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