Our Journey To Dodge Journey

recently consumed

life: my first new car buying experience

tasting notes

My husband and I are getting a new vehicle!! After many months of very casual discussion, a broken air conditioner and a particularly steamy month of May propelled us into a serious vehicle hunt. And as quickly as that hunt seemed to begin, we ended up choosing and ordering an… All-New 2009 Dodge Journey… feature packed, value added, technology driven!!! Woohoo, right?

You’ll have to excuse me, but this has been a very strange process for me that has not come without a fair amount of bias, both positive and negative. There is hefty pride and hefty skepticism, which was very difficult for me to overcome in an effort to make this decision as objective as possible.

The Journey began with consumer empathy…
You see, the Journey (which it wasn’t titled originally) was the first vehicle that I was dedicated to working on for my job. I participated in focus groups and did my first one-on-one ethnographic interviews with couples in their homes. While I did not know this before starting my job at Organic, I love doing empathetic, conversational consumer research. And the fact that I was doing it with young couples, recently married, recent first time home owners, pre-children, busy lives… well, I can’t say that it didn’t set my brain on a pathway to start thinking about how a crossover vehicle could really help out my lifestyle.

My husband was set on replacing his car with another car. But, as soon as I dropped this idea of possibilities, space, flexibility, and you know they aren’t as bad with fuel economy as they used to be, he was hooked as well. He started having dreams of the GMC Acadia and SUVs with built in DVD players. After all, this will be our first family vehicle.

Next was a lesson in engineering
Next, I spent some time interviewing the engineers who actually worked on the Journey vehicle. If you spend a great amount of time, like I do, stuck in never ending meetings about positioning lines and banner ads and marketing budgets, it can start to make you a cynic to the entire automotive process. The flashy enthusiasm of marketing speak becomes numbing and bland. But, when you sit down and interview the people who are actually excited because they created something with their own brains and with their own hands, you can’t help but get excited too. These are smart people, and they are really trying to make good decisions that actually relate to making better product and making products based on what people need. I am sure it is like this inside every automaker’s walls, inside every product manufacturer’s walls really. And sometimes that is easy to forget, unless you are talking to these people directly, which is why we do it.

So when my husband and I decided on a whim to stop by a Dodge dealer on the way home to check out the Journey, I knew far more that the car salesmen about the features and the reasons behind them. Actually, so did my husband, since he has been working on the Journey car commercials lately. Really, the dealer didn’t know much about anything and told us he’d get the keys for a test drive and then never returned. Hmmm… you’d think a car salesmen would be interested in making such a seemingly easy sale, even though we weren’t really ready to buy. While I had preconceived positive notions about Journey, I also had preconceived negative notions about dealers.

Overcoming preconceived notions
There comes in the trouble… preconceived ideas, biases. I felt a pit in my stomach that I was succumbing to enthusiasm based on the professional kool-aid that I have been drinking. And that only lead me to unearth a bunch of negative biases I also had built up in my system. Once the seed of doubt was planted that “this is too good to be true”, I began to feed the doubt with all the other not so positive information I am exposed to on a daily basis.

A big part of my job is also keeping tabs on the “voice of the consumer”. Whether it is through social networks, blogs, surveys, articles, etc., I often monitor the consumer perceptions that Chrysler needs to overcome in order to inform the work I do for Organic. After you hear the mantra of “poor interior quality” over and over again, it’s not only hard to disagree with it, but it is hard not to dwell on it. So I knew that to make a rationale and informed decision, we were going to need to keep our options open, start from the drawing board of true possibilities, and choose our favorites based on a multitude of factors.

Nissan Rogue
This was by far our most horrible dealership experience. We got a nice enough older Korean man, who wasn’t pushy per-say, but he also did not know ANYTHING about the vehicle. In fact, he proceeded to tell us misinformation, like that the Rogue had a DVD player option. We somehow got roped into sitting down for half an hour as he bounced back and forth between his boss and us, before telling us he couldn’t give us a quote, we would need to bring him a quote and he would match it. What??

But let’s get to the car. I’m not going to go into much detail, only gut reactions. We were not too happy about the exterior of the Rogue. It looks like a bug, the front end just sits too high and it feels a little cartoon-y. We honestly don’t care enough about cars to ever make that a deciding factor, although there are many who would. The interior, however, WOWed us. This was quality. The armrests were soft, the dash was stitched. Things felt nice, comfy, and substantial. American interior quality in the same price range is just not the same, and I was finally being given a good benchmark to base that assessment on.

Pontiac Torrent / Chevy Equinox (Saturn Vue)
We were hoping to compare more cars against the Rogue and the Journey, but the Torrent and Equinox were essentially the SAME exact car and thus we truly only looked at three models. In that mix as well is the Saturn Vue, which is slightly different than the Torrent and Equinox, but suffered many of the same drawbacks in our eyes. The dealership experience was at least quite pleasant, and we never got that ever feared pushy salesman.

The cars, however, were nothing terribly inspiring. They look quite good from the outside. We liked the look of the Equinox and certainly the Vue. But, cheap interior design was not a unique Chrysler problem, something that many forums and blogs I have read would have me believe. Maybe it was just the price point of these vehicles, but the interiors were of poor quality. I actually broke a piece of the seat handle in the Torrent in our test drive by just merely trying to tilt my seat back.

Back to the Dodge Journey
Our first real dealership experience, getting a test drive and a price quote, was far more enjoyable that our absent-minded salesmen at the previous dealership. We visited the Journey again to put everything back in perspective. It had magically made it on the list of cross-overs of a reasonable size in a reasonable price range, and the more we learned about the Journey the more that its value became a convincing factor. I was coming to expect things in other vehicles that seemed logical, they made sense, but they just weren’t there: fold flat seats, in floor storage, dvd system option. They were in the Journey, but not its competitors

The finishing line
And then it happened. Tom was ready to buy, just like that. He had done enough research. Because honestly, this was his new car we were buying. And so he was the master of the spreadsheet and the dealer relationship, and he was convinced. But my brain had a freak out… I tried to think of every reason why buying a Journey might be a bad idea. And ultimately, it came back to a gut reaction. Tom liked the Journey. I liked the Journey. What else matters?

All of my doubting and all of my playing devil’s advocate came back to why other people would not buy the Journey, not why we wouldn’t. That is the way my brain has been trained to think. I have been trained to think for the consumer to the point where sometimes I have a hard time thinking as myself in a consumer situation. So I said… fuck it, buy it. And we did.

It will arrive in 4 weeks, packed full of great features, ordered just the way we wanted it. And when it does, I’m sure I will have a whole other fun blog to write. Phew!!