On Marketing

I happened to hear a radio ad the other day for a local Boston area car dealership. The tag line at the end of the ad grabbed my attention (as tag lines are supposed to do):

“We don’t sell cars. We help people buy them.”

There must be a zillion businesses that use some variation of this consultative-selling message. But there’s a lot about the message to like, especially in the Internet age.

Here are just a few:

• It’s concise and to the point. Nine primary-school words. Only ten syllables in total.
• It grabs your attention. Who ever heard of a car dealership that didn’t sell cars?
• It doubles as a mission statement. It means as much to employees as it does to customers.
• It asserts that people can’t buy cars by themselves; they need help.
• It promises the customer that they will not encounter high-pressure sales tactics.
• It acknowledges that customers come to the dealership with some idea of what they want to buy.

This last message is the most subtle one but perhaps the most important.

Selling cars has changed dramatically with the advent of the Internet. Buyers no longer enter the showroom to start the shopping process. Before they visit a dealer, many of today’s buyers have already done considerable research. They can shop dealers from a wide geographic area from the comfort of their home. They have compared various makes and models and reduced their options to a short list. They know what specific cars each dealer has in inventory, and what specific options each car has. They have discovered the dealership’s wholesale cost for each car they are interested in and figured what they are willing to pay. For used cars, they can get a detailed history report. They have shopped around for the best loan or lease terms.

So what’s left for the dealership sales team to do?

A fair amount, actually.  For example:

• Most important, the customer has to make a decision to buy a specific car. That’s very different from a decision to shop. Many people need help coming to a decision.
• The customer may need help choosing between several possible deals. It’s the sales team’s job to make sure the customer chooses a deal they will be satisfied with.
• There’s a lot of paperwork to be done: the purchase agreement, payment, loan or lease contracts, vehicle registration, insurance. Much of this paperwork is a mystery to the average car buyer.
• The customer’s previous vehicle needs to be disposed of. Now that the customer has a new car, the last thing he wants to do is worry about the old one.

All of this is summed up nicely in the second half of the tag line: “We help people buy cars.”

I have no idea whether the marketing message of this tag line is actually carried over into the day-to-day sales practices at this dealership. I suspect that it is, because a tag line like this would not have been commissioned and approved by a dealership that was still stuck in pre-Internet car-selling practices.

How about you? Do your marketing messages acknowledge that the Internet has forever changed the relationship between buyer and seller? Do you expect customers to come to you well informed? Do you help with that information process (even though it may also aid your competitors?) Do you acknowledge that your customers expect consultative selling practices? Have you realized that products are becoming less important, and customer service more so? Do your marketing messages communicate this?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 9:51 am and is filed under Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.