Customer retention, relationship copy, and why going public

Toyota tops J.D Power customer royalty rating. J.D Power performs customer retention study on yearly basis. The industry average retention rate is 47.9. Toyota Motor's Toyota brand toppled its own Lexus brand to be the first the place with an impressive rate of 63.9. "Honda retained third place with 60.3 percent retention. GM's Cadillac ranks highest among American brands and sixth overall, with a 55.5 percent retention rate. The automaker's Chevrolet brand ranked seventh, with a 55.3 percent rate. A lot of that is due to high loyalty among Chevy pickup truck buyers.
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The rate is calculated as the total number of customers out of 100 new car purchasers of a specific brand who owned the brand before. (my guess)

It's a lot cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to grab from someone else's. - A common mistake American firms make.

One marketing research shows that it takes 3 times (not quite sure. Need to consult the marketing textbook) as many efforts to win new customers as to keep existing customers.

Technology is easy to copy, but not management culture and relationships. The Toyota production system, product development system, supplier and customer relationships are not easy to copy and implement overnight. It takes Toyota over 50 years' continuous and relentless effort to reach the level of today. Top management needs to have strong desire and long term view to implement. It's a huge task. Need a lot of time and energy and commitment.

Wall Street is part of the reason why the top management has lost long term vision of a company. In this sense, a private company is much easier to commit to a long term goal. That's why Wall Street likes Honda to be run by a group of engineers and in the same time, hates it is run by a group of engineers.

Then why a company needs to go public to raise money? Why not just use private settlement to fund its expansion and growth? Why does it need to issue stocks to raise money? Theoretically, if a firm has potential to generate profit, everybody wants to invest in it. Banks are more like to invest on a public company because of the SEC filings, I guess. It's easy to get the financial reporting for a publicly owned company. On the other hand, a publicly owned company has to put itself under the magnifying glass of SEC and financial analysts.