I’ve been musing if this is the new normal: Is custom ordering the future of car sales (8-minute Automotive News video). The dealership mentioned, Pat Milliken Ford, is a founding member of Ford’s Consumer Experience Movement, an initiative I’m proud to serve. They are no slouches at CX–customer experience–and bring some questions to mind for any industry: How do you …
EVs: coming sooner than you think?
This article has been making the rounds with my automotive colleagues. Do you buy it? I am very interested in your comments below. (I would like to know how eliminating cheaper coal electricity and government subsidies would affect the projections.)
McKinsey & Co. on unexpected coronavirus impacts
A plethora of resources in this McKinsey update. Many of my clients are car dealers … I have to say that some of these unexpected impacts were very much expected by them.
What getting scammed taught me about trust
“Mr. Ramsay, this is American Express. Did you just spend $600 at the Levi’s outlet store in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania?” In case you are wondering, that was NOT what I wanted to hear while standing in a client’s conference room getting ready to start a meeting. Here is how it happened: The night before, I arrived a hotel I …
Three car salesmen, three unbelievable stories
This is just neat. An Indian engineer who fled Sikh persecution became a car salesman in Canada. He became so good at it that he ended up running a dealership, then owning multiple dealerships. Now a millionaire, he’s the only NBA fan ever to receive a championship ring and to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. RELATED: I learned …
Do customers trust machines over people?
The article’s title ought to give us pause: “People put more faith in computers than other humans.” I know of a pilot project where automotive service departments set up kiosks for customers to use as an alternative to talking to a professional service advisor. The kiosk outsold the humans. Perhaps people trusted that professionals programmed the kiosk to know exactly …
Steve Stauning on cost-cutting during lean inventories
This is a post just for my car dealership friends: Automotive retail Internet legend Steve Stauning has advice for what to cut and what not to cut as we go through a period of lean inventories. That’s pretty operational for this blog, but one thing to highlight: Because we know the chip shortage will be resolved at some point and …
Automotive disruption is (finally) here?
Another for my automotive friends: The data and historical examples are sobering in colleague Dr. Dan Edgar’s predictions of disruption for automotive retail. For example, BEVs have a life cycle of 500,000 to 1 million miles. Hmm. Great organizations test their own assumptions. What here challenges your team’s current thinking? What do you want to do with it?
Has Google changed everything for marketing?
I’m posting this in the hopes that I hear from my many clients and colleagues in the automotive sector. How big a deal will this be? Apple has gone to market emphasizing its protection of users’ privacy. Meanwhile, Google faces regulatory pressure and public criticism because it tracks and sells user data. Perhaps all that pressure has had an impact. …
A sector that thrived in 2020
If there was one word I became sick of in 2020, it was “unprecedented.” It was a good way to hedge bets: Things can be unprecedentedly good or unprecedentedly bad. So I appreciated this article from automotive vendor Roadster sidestepping “unprecedented,” “good” and “bad,” going straight for the obvious: “crazy.” But dust is starting to settle in Crazy Town. The …