Auto Sales Marketing: Welcome To The Internet |
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Terry S. Vostor
2 August 2009
Welcome to the "Information Superhighway". Hold onto your hats on the quick and fast drive to marketing as well as "target marketing". "Broadcasting" a single message driven incessantly to your customer and potential customer group is long gone. In the automotive industry you might have used earlier forms of advertising and media as newspapers or even more innovative forms of advertising and promotion as TV or radio to drive customers to your dealership. Now those days are long gone. It's a time of transition. What used to work and be a driving force is diminished in speed and power. They are still will be the standbys that will be an engine to move customers to your doors and auto sales people. Yet it might be said and stated in the communication, sales and marketing trades, that newspapers and other mass media are an industry which cannot see it own demise - even though they are in the business of market and marketing analysis and communication. It's all about new and newness and modern forms of communication, sales and marketing. Out with old and outmoded models, in with the new, or so it seemed. Nothing can be truer, more pointed and exact of a Clint Eastwood explanation in a cowboy movie after shooting a villain on the road that "He's dead. He just does not know it yet". So goes mass marketing in the automotive sales and marketing trades.
The marketing model used to be a top down driven variety of a marketing message that would be researched at some length and then "broadcast" or repeated incessantly through the tools of the time - radio, TV and newspapers. This was the most effective, cost effective, efficient, productive and ultimately profitable method of the time - of past times. Now it is just too expensive and other options are available. It was simply a matter of mud against the wall. If the message was broadcast to millions of people and potential customers and only 1/10 of one percent of those people made the purchase all would be grand. Customers would flock to the door, product would be bought and companies, salespeople and dealerships would make tons of cash and bonuses.
Not now today. It's just too expensive to deliver product in this manner. People "know more today". They can do their own product and indeed marketing research. One answer does not fit all prospects and their needs. Customers need specific marketing needs, as well as their own individual problems solved.
The internet and computer technologies - whether it be in software or services allows such flexibilities. Whether it's in simple old hat web 1.0 basic product descriptions and information provisions or the newer, more interactive web 2.0 two way discussion and interaction, the results are all the same. The older one way forms of advertising and promotion in the auto trades are diminishing fast. They will still retain use to some degree. However they are being superseded by newer, more selective and ultimately more efficient and effective routes and routings.
Its time to rethink your basic strategies, tactics and marketing mix when it comes to auto sales in modern times. It's hard enough out there already on the roads and highways of America and Canada.