J.D. “Dave” Power, Who Made Quality Count in the Car Industry, Has Died

From Autoweek

• J.D. Power and his wife, Julie, established J.D. Power and Associates in 1968, funding it with a second mortgage on the house.

• The “Associates” in the company name were Julie and the kids, who helped send out and tabulate surveys.

• Power sold the company to McGraw Hill in 2005. He continued working in a supporting role until 2009.

It might be a vast oversimplification to say that before J.D. Power and Associates came along there was absolutely no incentive for carmakers to make quality cars, but you could say it anyway. Anyone who remembers the quality products foisted on an unwitting public in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s remembers.

It was J.D. Power and Associates that took it upon themselves to introduce quality to the auto industry or, in many cases, force it on them. And once they did, everyone benefitted.

“There was no interest in finding out what customers really thought,” Power once said of the pre-JDP era. “Instead, we were constantly asked to ‘torture the data until it confessed,’ giving up the answers that the executives wanted to hear.”

It was that “closed-minded thinking,” as Power once said, along with the cold Midwest winters, that got Power and his family to move west in 1965. He had been a financial analyst for Ford, then represented General Motors as a marketing research consultant for Marplan and then headed up marketing at Case tractors before heading west. Once out in sunny California, he did some consulting, took a position at McCulloch chainsaws, then got the itch to break out on his own after he heard that three of his fellow Wharton MBA grads had already started their own companies.

So, three years after Power, his wife and co-founder Julie, and their three kids (soon to be four) moved to Calabasas, Calif., they started J.D. Power and Associates on the family’s kitchen table, funding it with a second mortgage on the house. The “Associates” in the company name were Julie and the kids. Julie tabulated survey returns while the kids took turns stuffing envelopes with more customer surveys and scotch-taping a quarter onto each one as an incentive to fill them out and return them.

From those humble beginnings, J.D. Power and Associates would change the auto industry forever.

But it took some hard work first.