Margins and Paddings Update

Have you heard of #CreditChat? #CreditChat is an online discussion that happens on Twitter and YouTube every Wednesday at 3 p.m. ET. It's an educational and fun hour when we discuss credit and money issues with consumers, personal finance writers, academics, and financial organizations. We discuss a different financial topic each week; including credit scores, financial goal planning, saving money, reducing and eliminating debt, earning more money, and retirement. We also talk about fun topics like "How to Throw a Dinner Party on a Budget" and "How to Eat Healthy (Without Breaking the Bank)." We've been hosting these chats for two years – and we're excited to host our 100th chat this coming Wednesday. This week, we will talk about credit reports with Rod Griffin, our director of Public Education. Rod will be answering credit questions in a live Google+ hangout. If you've never attended our weekly chat, we'd love for you to join us. You can follow or join the Twitter conversation here – or watch the live streaming YouTube video.

Partnership with Experian Marketing Services will help Bare Necessities offer its customers a more seamless and rewarding experience across touch-points, including call-center support and email communications Bare Necessities, the largest online specialty retailer of women’s and men’s branded and designer intimate apparel and lingerie, entered into an agreement with Experian Marketing Services, a recognized leader in data-driven marketing, that will help the retailer better understand and engage with its customers. Using the Experian Marketing Suite, Bare Necessities has the ability to plan, manage, execute and optimize all of its customer interactions in real time across any channel, all from within a single system. “Customers choose Bare Necessities because we offer them a better way to buy bras,” said Noah Wrubel, cofounder and chief executive officer, Bare Necessities. “The Experian Marketing Suite will help us take that customer experience to the next level, a more personal level, and meet our customers’ expectations each and every time, regardless of the channel.” Experian Marketing Services’ awarding-winning platform integrates customer data from any source and channel into an always-fresh central repository so that responses and behaviors can be recorded in real time and immediately leveraged for more effective targeting, triggering and personalization of marketing campaigns. Comprised of three core capabilities, the Experian Marketing Suite is designed to help marketers identify their customers (Identity Manger), understand their customers (Intelligence Manager) and engage with their customers across channels (Interactions Manager). For example, the Interactions Manager is powering Bare Necessities’ granular segmentation strategy, giving the company the ability to target and deliver customer communications, such as email and direct mail, based on a customer’s unique body type, the products and brands he or she loves and how he or she likes to shop. Wrubel continued, “Bare Necessities customers don’t need to worry about awkward dressing rooms and overly anxious sales people when they are shopping for intimate apparel; they can just visit our site, call our bra-fit experts or chat with us online. One of the things that we’re most excited about in working with Experian is that we can give our bra-fit experts and customer-service staff access to the Interactions Manager within the Experian Marketing Suite. This capability allows us to have better conversations with our customers from the very beginning and remove any anxiety from the experience altogether.” Backed by the industry’s highest-rated client-services team, the Experian Marketing Suite is built with the scale and flexibility to support digital programs of any size and sophistication. Experian Marketing Services’ 30 years of data and marketing technology leadership have helped to position the Experian’s Marketing Suite as the world’s most flexible and comprehensive marketing solution with more than 10,000 of the world’s leading brands, in more than 30 countries, using the platform. For more information about Experian Marketing Suite, visit: http://bit.ly/1z0TpJr.

Just how loyal are consumers to a particular make or model of vehicle? A new Experian Automotive study answers this question by highlighting the loyalty behavior of consumers who got rid of their previous vehicle to purchase a new one. The analysis showed that, overall, Ford owners had the highest percentage of loyalty when returning to market, with 60.8 percent purchasing another Ford vehicle. Rounding out the top five makes with the highest percentages of loyal consumers were Toyota, Subaru, Kia and Lexus, with 59.1 percent, 57.7 percent, 57.2 percent and 55.9 percent returning to buy another vehicle of the same make. “Vehicle loyalty is an important industry metric because it tells automakers how successful their vehicles are with the general public,” said Brad Smith, Director of Automotive Market Statistics for Experian Automotive. “When analyzing loyalty, Experian Automotive uses disposal methodology, meaning we track when a consumer replaces a vehicle that he or she originally purchased new with another new vehicle. This approach creates a more direct correlation between a purchased and owned vehicle to provide automakers and dealers with insights that can become actionable with regard to production volumes, design changes or sales incentives.” The analysis also looked at the loyalty rates of some of the most popular vehicle segments on the road, including entry-level CUVs, full-sized pickups and small economy cars. The models with the most loyal consumers in each category include the Honda CR-V, the Ford F-150 and the Toyota Corolla, with 41.6 percent, 45.0 percent and 30.4 percent of their drivers returning to buy another vehicle of the same make and model. For more information about Experian insights into the automotive market, please visit ExperianAutomotive.com.