Tyre Distribution At Car Dealers and Workshops

No doubt about it: distribution of passenger car and truck tyres is undergoing a dramatic change in Germany. With the (re)-organised workshops and fast fitters a lot of new distributors of passenger car tyres have entered the market in recent years, attacking the monopoly of the professional tyre retailers, which had been successfully preserved over the past decades. In addition, the tyre distribution channel of car dealers has grown continuously over the last few years.

Approximately every third car tyre is sold through this kind of distributor nowadays. The speed of this process will increase because all leading car manufacturers have developed programmes to accompany the customers with a lifelong full-service, which includes tyres and wheels. How threatening is all this for tyre retailers? It would be possible to have a nice discussion about these trends but we wanted to take a look on the concrete, everyday tyre business situation at car dealers and car repair workshops.

For this we visited a total of ten companies in Hamburg. Who is selling tyres? Under which conditions are they sold? What about the competence and motivation of the employees? Do they give advice to customers? If so, how good is this advice? Where are tyres neglected as a product? How professional is the marketing? Which companies could be regarded as serious competitors to tyre retailers? The variation in the results of this report could hardly have been wider! In general the trend is that most of the car dealers and workshop stations are miles away from a professional tyre marketing operation. There is always a big difference between the stated goals and the actual achievement in real life.