Choosing you car is an important decision for most people. The average UAE motorist will spend three full years of their life driving, so it is important to pick a car that is comfortable and suits your style.
Your car can say a lot about you, with certain vehicles being associated with a certain type of person. For example, luxury saloons such as BMWs and Mercedes tend to be associated with well-paid professional jobs.
We wanted to look into these associations further and match car brands with the type of person most likely to drive them
How we Did it
We started off by selecting 10 of the biggest UAE car manufacturers to analyse. These represent a range of vehicle types - off-road, luxury and city car brands are all included.
Next, we needed to identify information that would help us build a better picture of the kind of person that would drive our selected car brand. The following data points were used:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Disposable income
This information was taken from YouGov profiles. YouGov builds profiles not just by finding the average age, location, profession and other points for an audience, but by comparing these averages with those across the UAE.
By formulating its data in this way, YouGov allows true insight into the unique audience groups who drive the cars produced by our manufacturers, without us having to worry about data being skewed by sheer numbers of people in a certain group.
Key differences between the drivers of our range of brands have been highlighted by this research, and whilst some might have been expected, others took us by surprise. Find out more below.
Professions
We were interested to see whether certain professions gravitated towards certain cars, and if so was this down to practical uses.
One brand we found closely tied to a profession through its features was Land Rover. A well-known off-road vehicle with impressive towing power, the Land Rover is often the chosen car for agriculture and farming workers. 16.3% of Land Rover owners are farmers, despite the profession only accounting for 7.8% of the population.
Other professions associated with Land Rover also involved off-road driving; quarrying and property management were the second- and third-highest ranking professions for the brand.
Other cars do appear to attract certain areas of industry, even if they do not have a practical link to the work involved. BMWs, for example, tend to belong to well-paid professionals from consulting, business and real estate jobs.
Mini’s customer base is similar to its parent company, BMW, with real estate, advertising and law professionals making up the top three professions to purchase the re-vamped iconic cars.
Citroen’s professional base was a little more difficult to predict. It features quite a few creatives, with home and garden and fashion design being the top two industries linked with the brand.