Dealer & Designer Article by Todd Lawson for Strategy Mob

ARTICLE: Dealer & Designer

Originally written and published in Strategy Mob Magazine, October 2015 – Issue 01 and also featured on their website.

Your focus is on moving metal. A good relationship with your creative team will help you sell more.

You have a great dealership. Good deals, too. But something is stopping people from coming through your doors.  I’m not talking about a dirty showroom or a bad customer experience; I’m talking about bad marketing creative.

Good creative gets noticed

Think about it on a grand scale. The leading juried creative awards show in the world, the Cannes Lions has a category dedicated to effectiveness in creative marketing. Judging is based on how well a marketing idea or initiative improves a client’s business over three years. Just to enter, a marketing campaign must include very detailed submissions with real data on results—proof that marketing and creative ideas can generate a real return. This year, Volvo won top honors, for the second year in a row, for its series of digital videos detailing the features in its vehicles (such as the now-famous YouTube video of Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits). Why did Volvo win? By demonstrating on a sustained basis to have real quantitative and qualitative results. Simply put, Volvo’s creative sold a lot of vehicles globally.

Why should you care? Better creative will sell more cars. And dealerships can do small things with their creative team to do the same—without Jean-Claude.

Working with dealers, OEMs and associations for so many years, I know that the priority tends to be too focused on moving metal. Dealers spend little to no time finding their unique voice as a brand, which can be a fatal misstep in a time when more people are looking to online presence and advertising before they even consider if you’re the right place for them to visit…(read more on Strategy mob)

What to read the rest? Read it online: Strategy Mob Magazine – Dealer and Designer.