Car Dealers - Promotions & Advertising
There aren’t many industries in the world nowadays that are staying static. We are in a state of constant flux, where every business is having to deal with the ups and downs of an economy that has been battered by a pretty harsh storm. The economic instability isn’t the only area of the business world that is constantly changing either – we are having to wrestle with the public’s expectations, governmental guidelines, and constant changes in technology and people’s needs. Gone are the days where a product lifecycle was years if not decades – now we are lucky if a product that was successful at the beginning of the year is still successful by the end!
The car industry is the same as all the other areas of business and economics at the moment – having to adjust and adapt in order to ensure that it stays on top of the trends. Perhaps they are even more affected, because the whole way that people shop is changing by the day. This means that all those long term well established methods of selling that are so pivotal to the whole set up of car dealers and car dealerships are changing, which will no doubt be at big expense to all the companies involved.
Take, for example, the move in marketing that has been happening for nearly a decade now. Marketing is moving slowly but surely away from print advertising into a more digital format, and in the past year this move has been picking up pace. Some car dealers are quite au fait with this new way of doing things, but others are reluctant to back away from the print and radio adverts that have always been the linchpin of car dealer promotions and advertising. Plus, we also have to think about all the physically based business who are slowly finding themselves going out of business.
Another area where it is all change for most of the car industry is how people search for their cars. The days of going down to your nearest car dealer to have a look around have all but gone, and pretty much everyone stars their search online instead. Consequently it is becoming more and more important to have an all singing all dancing website that makes it very easy for people to find both you and your cars. People need to be able to enquire online or via email, and often they won’t even come into the dealership right up until they have to take the car of their choice out for the obligatory test drive.
I can see this change continuing. I can see a vision where car dealers are almost entirely online – where you place your deposit over the web, sign up for finance, and do all the haggling over some for of instant messenger. I can even see it getting to the point where we book a slot of a test drive, and the car in question is bought to us. I don’t know how I feel about this – but it seems to be the way it is going!