The Customer Is In Control

Prologue: Fair Warning

Heading into the holidays, you likely have an obligation to those special people on your gift list.  And how you go about fulfilling that obligation has certainly evolved from coping with parking, crowds, and seasonal salespeople at the shopping mall.  Besides the fact that my neighborhood shopping mall has closed, the pathway to finding the perfect gift, at the best price, with the fastest delivery is now resolved with a few clicks.

Take the above analogy as “fair warning” in designing your dealership’s 2025 marketing plan  – The Customer is in Control!

Not Your Fav, the Customer’s Fav

Think about all the changes in both the digital realm as well as the media landscape with streaming choices, YouTube viewing habits, and the way we consume information, the customer is in control, even down to how they shop on a website.  They have the choice to use the digital retailing tool.  They have the choice to submit their information, call and inquire, or just show up after looking at the information on your website and be armed with all the information when they walk in your door, and you never knew this customer existed.

The whole realm about this as you go into 2025, every dealer and every marketer must realize it’s not about selecting the right channels based on what you prefer, it’s about utilizing the platforms and methods that enable targeting the customer the way they want to be targeted.  We’ve experienced a shift from how we’ve always tried to funnel the customer, to where now the customer has everything from TikTok to influence them, social media, what they see in streaming, what they see from content creators, what they see from thousands of random things that show up in any one of their selected feeds any day of the week, any time of the day.

Out with The Old, In With The New

The dynamic of the market playing field is already changing well before the official Presidential Inauguration on Monday, January 20^th. Which way, and how soon overall consumer attitude swings in terms of being better off, the same, or worse, will be a determining factor as the year unfolds.

I share these statistics from the 2024 survey of buyers in the Capital One Car Buying Outlook: 

• 26% of buyers said working with dealers they trust is most important…only 10% said price
• 48% of buyers were willing to visit dealerships with higher prices if felt the dealership could be trusted

No doubt the customer is in control, but you have complete control over your message  Now is the time to give your current digital presentation a deep examination. You know how hard it is to earn trust without years-old negative reviews floating in the cyber world.

Challenge: All Things to All People

This whole concept of control is hard to fathom in terms of marketing: you must be all things to all people.  The one thing I would like to stress to every person who reads this newsletter is to realize and embrace that we are in a new phase where the customer has total control over how they want to buy, what they want to buy, and most importantly when they want to buy.