Does your brand have an ecosystem?

I’m one of those people who likes to drive a car until there’s not much car left to drive. Sure, a shiny new car is fun, but it’s not that much fun to me; I think that 150,000 miles is the time to start thinking about what your next car might be, and the ideal situation is to have all the money in the bank for it so you can smile and just write the dealer a check when they say, “And what about financing?”

Sometimes life doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. For example, when the timing belt fails at highway speeds, and all the valves in the cleverly designed interference engine under your hood happily smash themselves into scrap. Yes, I had a lovely weekend.

And so my beloved aging Jetta 1.8T now needs repairs that come close to the value of the car; not being a gearhead, I’m getting a new car earlier than I expected. I’m really down about this; I loved that car. I loved the styling of the last version of the Jetta, I loved that torquey turbo engine, I loved zipping around town in it, looking in the rear view mirror to watch the dog happily sniffing out the cracked window, and I really loved making no car payments and being able to take it for to the neighborhood Volkswagen guru for minor repairs and maintenance. (The Jetta was going there this week for an oil change and basic service, at which point the timing belt would no doubt have been replaced. Very, very bad timing for me indeed.)

And that neighborhood VW guru is one of the things that made me love that car. Because I could drive up and walk in and say, “Hey, it’s doing this, what do you think?” and get smart answers and service at reasonable rates - all in walking distance from my house. Another thing that made owning that car a good thing: sites like VW Vortex, where I could go get info from VW enthusiasts who know a lot more than me about the ins and outs and quirks (because all Volkswagens have quirks!) of my car.

They’re part of the ecosystem of Volkswagen. I love VWs but let’s face it: they are not as reliable as Toyotas and they cost more than Hondas. People like me buy them because they’re a million times more fun to drive, at least if you like the German car driving experience; they feel very different. People like them because you climb into one and are in an unquestionable European car, not a bland but functional Japanese car. And that ecosystem of businesses and enthusiasts keeps buyers coming back to the Volkswagen dealer; it supports a market of enthusiasts who buy the old ones. (Many of them are answering my Craigslist ad for a non-running project car right now.)

This is all good for Volkwagen.

You’ll find a similar ecosystem of businesses around most European car makes, as well as many others; the people who love those cranky old Jags, the guy with that stunning 20 year old Mercedes out back, the people who trick out little Hondas into racing machines, and so on.

But it seems that car makers are not fond of that ecosystem. I called my VW guru after my weekend disaster and he told me first that he couldn’t fix the car for any less than the dealer would, and my judgment that it was time to let it go was right; and that he was going to stop working on VWs anyway, because it’s just getting too difficult and expensive to get special tools and repair information from Volkswagen.

What? Well, let’s face it; the margins on new cars aren’t that great, and dealerships make money from service. So it seems that VW is putting the squeeze on independent repair shops to drive customers to dealers for everything. And, I discovered as I did some reading up, it’s not just Volkswagen, it’s everybody.

Not surprisingly, a move has started (led by the association for independent repair shops to force carmakers to provide information to anybody who wants to fix a car.

I have no opinion on the legal merits of this; I’m not a lawyer. Independents argue that if someone buys a car, they have a right to all the information about the car so they can have anybody they want fix it. Manufacturers (and their dealers) argue that things like computer codes for diagnosis and repair manuals are their intellectual property, and they can sell that information however they choose. I see legal merits to both, from my non-lawyer perspective.

But from a marketing perspective, I think this is bad news for the industry. It won’t matter much to the segment of car buyers who keep cars for just a few years and trade them in. But for others, it really is a problem. Suddenly the repair options narrow to the set of dealers in your town. And when you break down in the middle of nowhere - as I did - the chances of finding somebody who can fix your car diminish greatly. (We had to tow the car 75 miles to get to someone who could figure out what was wrong. Ah, it was a lovely weekend.)

As I read all of this I thought about the IT world. Microsoft has done so well in part because they’ve done a good job of letting the Windows ecosystem thrive; they treat their small partner extremely well, and as a result it’s easy to find lots of people to build and support applications and infrastructure that’s got Windows at its heart. Apple has been knocked for not doing this well; people still buy Apple because many of us think it’s a superior product, and we’re willing to put up with a healthy but smaller range of software and having generally fewer people around to support it.

And a number of people have identified problems in the Windows ecosystem as one of the biggest challenges facing the company right now; Houston Chronicle columnist Dwight Silverman has talked about this for a while, and Gartner has echoed his thoughts on it.

For a consumer product like an automobile, this is pretty dangerous. There’s a huge emotional component to buying a car; let’s face it, if we all were just thinking of basic transportation needs and cost, we’d be driving Hyundais. Hyundai offers a model for almost every driving niche, has excellent quality rankings, and has very competitively priced products. I’ve never met anyone who is the least bit excited about anything they make, but it’s hard to argue that they’re not a very smart purchase.

The ecosystem about a car manufacturer makes it easier to put up with some of the downsides of a particular brand, just as the ecosystem around Windows has made it easier for people to put up with that OS’s problems.

I’m curious how this will play out in the auto industry; as a consumer and someone who loves his VWs, wrinkles and all, I’m rooting for the independents; I want my local mechanic to be able to service my car and make a living at it. As a marketer, I’d advise the manufacturers that they might steer some revenue to their dealers in the short term with this approach, but they are risking brand loyalty in the long term.

(There are 7 VW dealers in the greater Houston area; the only one that’s actually convenient to me is truly awful. In the same area there are 15 Honda dealers. If I have to go there for service, this really is an issue.)

We’re used to thinking about channels when we make marketing decisions, but it’s important to think about your unofficial channels, too. Do you have an ecosystem of supporting businesses? If you think they’re taking revenue from you in some cases, consider whether they’re also creating a market for your products at the same time. Think about how your decisions will affect them, and whether those decisions might hurt you in the long term.

Because no company exists in isolation, and in business as in nature, everything’s interdependent.

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