HOW DEALERS CAN FIND WAYS TO SUCCESSFULLY CONNECT WITH THE NEXT GENERATION
OF CAR BUYERS
At this year’s CADA Summit, Ramesh Swamy, of Deloitte’s National and Retail Distribution Leadership Team talked about establishing relevant dialogue for the next generation of automotive buyers, especially the customer experience. “This is going to be everything moving forward,” he said.
For many dealers, how that “customer experience” will be defined remains a challenge. Research shows that Generation Y buyers don’t respond to the same marketing techniques that perhaps their parents or older siblings did. The concept of channeling marketing efforts through mass messaging simply aren’t as effective as they used to be and younger generations, used to a more personalized environment, want to receive messages and information they feel is relevant to them.
When it comes to shopping for vehicles, that means targeting specific groups of consumers and delivering your marketing message in such a way that it establishes a connection with them.
Gary Edwards, chief customer officer at Customer Experience Management (CEM) provider Empathica, believes that in the age of information, what it all boils down to is that educated car buyers are looking for educated dealers. “When a consumer in today’s world feels connected to the buying experience, they’re more likely to purchase,” he says.
Edwards notes that dealers need to be acutely aware of what shoppers are thinking during the evaluation phase of the buying process. By doing so, they’re able to plan a better response, more effectively engage with their audience and as a result, turn these shoppers into actual customers.
The problem it seems is that many of us aren’t actually at that stage yet. While more and more dealerships are investing their time and energy into digital marketing, often the message doesn’t get communicated properly — as a result, the outcome isn’t often what’s expected, or desired.
UNDERSTANDING RELEVANCE
Edwards believes part of that problem is that while technology itself has evolved, providing consumers with more access to information, such as pricing, features and reviews on specific vehicles, the actual concept of marketing the car and the dealership selling it hasn’t really changed, especially when it comes to targeting younger consumers. He says that there is still a consensus that you can just be on Facebook or Twitter, compress your existing message and send it out. “It is the way these mediums are used,” he says, “the immediacy, the small number of interactions that occur.”
The problem is that when consumers, especially younger shoppers have done their research on you, they expect you to do research on them. It also means that if you’ve managed to convey a positive presence and reputation online and as a result consumers have contacted you, when it comes to following up, the expectations are high and dealers need to make sure they can live up to their reputation.
That’s why arguably, the actual buying experience of the vehicle is more important than ever. Edwards notes that while the access to information has shifted, arming consumers unlike ever before, the actual vehicle purchase process has barely evolved within the last 40 years.
Research and initial touch points aside, consumers still have to go to a physical dealership, talk with a sales representative, schedule a test drive and negotiate a purchase.
The fact that a car is one of the most expensive items most people will ever buy, also means that there’s often a great deal of emotion tied up into the purchase experience, which in itself can have both a positive and negative outcome. And at the end of the day, when it comes down to it, the control for making that experience a positive one ultimately rests at the hands of the dealership and the individual in contact with the customer.
And the experience that customer has can have a major impact down the road, for as Gary Edwards notes, while the concept of advocacy hasn’t changed, the platform for delivering it has. “Social media has opened the floodgates,” he says. “Ten years ago an advocate’s message would typically reach a handful of people. We now find our individual influence spreading to hundreds or thousands in a matter of minutes.”
