Ankur Jain

Dr. A.C. Shukla

Abstract

This research paper deals with quantification of reputational losses beard by various car manufacturers due to recall announcements from 1 July 2012 to 1 November 2015 with the help of an index named, Car manufacturer reputation loss index. Moreover, it seeks to assess positive and negative intensities of seven different factors, those can affect manufacturer's reputation due to car recall announcements, with the help of a social survey conducted in three cities of Madhya Pradesh namely Bhopal, Indore and Ujjain. These seven identified factors are volume of recalls, frequency of recalls, type of recall, cost of parts replaced, time taken to fix the problem after recall announcement, replacement of part related to safety concern and social media. Various companies involved in this assessment are Honda, Ford, Maruti Suzuki and General Motors. The research findings suggest that Honda suffered most due to the highest frequency of recalls, as CMRLI value for Honda is 6.979, while, Maruti Suzuki suffered least with CMRLI value of 1.644. The most negative factors identified are volume of recalls, frequency of recalls and time taken to fix the problem after recall announcement, while, replacement of part related to safety concern is considered to be the most positive factor. This research suggests that recalls are invariably associated with reputational losses.

Keywords- Car manufacturer reputation loss index, Recall announcements, Pairwise comparisons, Eigen vectors