Sure, we’ve all seen them-the cheesy tv commercials the local car dealership puts on your local tv station. Gimmicks, cheap suits you wouldn’t wish your worst enemy to be buried in, godawful production values and ad copy written by an eighth grader fronted by car salesmen whose acting is so wooden they would not stand a chance of landing a role even the smallest town’s local theater group. You either cringe, or laugh out loud at just truly awful it is. It’s one thing when the ad is by your local Honda, Chevy or Toyota dealer. The cars speak for themselves, and in many cases, sell themselves based on reputation alone. The buyer can laugh off those horrible commercials.
That’s fine when you are one of the best selling brands out there, but what if you are a brand trying to establish a new identity? A brand trying to come off as a premium one at that? That changes things. As automotive journalists, myself and Founding Editor Gary Grant have seen firsthand just how hard car companies try to foster a certain image to their prospective buyers. The work they do is exhaustive, I assure you. You, the car buyer, or casual enthusiast, many not see it, but major car manufacturers today have entire departments focused solely on social media, public perception, and are constantly trying to find new ways to reach out to new car buyers.
Take, for example, Buick. After GM’s restructuring, Buick stands alone as the gap between Chevy and Cadilliac, but was saddled with an aging buyer demographic and somewhat stale cars. Not the sort of thing that gets your adrenaline pumping. Buick’s current line, with the LaCrosse, Regal, and Verano are all fine cars seeking a new, younger, yet affluent audience. The cars are good, but Buick has a long way to go of changing the mindset of car buyers under the age of 60 to want their car.
Buick fully understands the image problem. A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to attend a special event in Boston, the hippest, most vibrant city in all of my native New England. In an effort to tap into Boston’s young, affluent car buying market, the idea was to combine the allure of fine cuisine with the opportunity to see, touch, and sample the latest and greatest Buick has to offer. Not an inexpensive undertaking, but fine food is a clever way of attracting the desired crowd. And hey, even if they do not actually buy a Buick, the casual Bostonian foodee is surely going to tell his/her friends and family that the new Buicks are actually pretty cool cars.
So, you see, Buick is trying their hardest with updating their image, with quality cars to back it up. But…those dealer ads. I won’t name them, but the local Buick dealer is airing a promotion called ‘A Buick for a Buck.” That is, a one dollar down payment for your brand new Buick. The advertisements are relentless, but the tagline on each commercial is the dealer ‘just wants to get you a loan.’ It brings the car down to the lowest common denominator. That it isn’t even about the car anymore.
And therein lies the problem. Buick is trying their hardest to build good cars, and rebuild their image with the aim to appeal to a broader audience-namely, a more affluent audience. But the local Buick dealer is the face of your company, and their message to the car buying public in your area is we will get you a loan as long as you have a pulse. In thirty seconds, the millions of dollars Buick has invested in their cars, and their marketing efforts have instantly evaporated. Buick wants to be an aspirational brand, but with tv commercials like these, they cannot. Buick, as a company, has set its sights on Lexus, but with ads like these, it literally leads a path to Lexus’ door, since they never put junk like this on the air.
Buick, you’ve done the hard work of building a good car. You know you need to reach out the the buyer you want, and you are. But the dealer is where the money changes hands. Sure, I could have gone to Boston, enjoyed the beautiful city and fine food as a backdrop to your cars and come away impressed. But my local Buick dealer keeps telling me if my credit is awful, or if I have one dollar, I can have a new Buick. And to the dealer, don’t tell me you can just get me a loan, tell me you can sell me an awesome car.
It's an excellent point, one that has as much to do with a saturated market as much as anything else.
Buick has about 2,400 dealers nationwide, meaning that the average Buick dealer sold 7.5 new Buicks last month. Speaking as someone with a few years of dealership management experience, that's a very scary number.
Granted, there aren't a lot of stand-alone Buick dealers in the world, so it's not as if they have to "survive" on just 7.5 new car sales…but it does mean that you can become very desperate to sell any new Buick you can.
Contrast this number with Toyota, which sold 180,000 new vehicles via 1,250 dealers (144 new cars per dealer). At a Toyota store, you spend a lot less time staring at your co-workers, which in turn means that you don't feel compelled to resort to desperate advertising.
While it's a little more complicated than this (some dealers are just bad), as a general rule, reducing dealer head count raises the quality of marketing.
This is a great point! While most people think that the fancy national commercials and other marketing materials is when helps to sell, the truth is that how a car dealer is perceived by customers is significantly impact by local advertising and how their local dealerships operate. If the local dealership, which works directly with customers in person, has an issue, it impact consumers image of the brand overall.
No offense to Jason but your math really does not support your comment. If you compare the numbers by month an average Toyota dealer would sell 12 cars per month or just 4.5 cars more per month than an average Buick dealer. How that many more cars a month translates into less time talking with your coworkers is beyond me. The true difference is that the luxury brands to which Buick aspires all have conditions in their dealer contracts that prevent the dealer from doing commercials outside the corporate message format. That is the whole argument that Tesla is using to try and dismantle state regulations giving car dealerships a monopoly on selling cars. I truly wish Buick luck.