Digital Mileage

John Holt
President and CEO, Cobalt

No matter what fuel they run on, cars are going to be core to American transportation and dealers will sell them and service them, whether you look out five years or twenty.  Key aspects of the business will stay the same too; consumers will use credit and buy vehicles on time, trade-ins will create transaction complexity, cars will need some level of service and warranty protection, accessories and personalization will likely grow from today’s baseline, etc.  But many things can and will be improved, ranging from marketing, to the transaction, to customer communication post-purchase.  And, the Internet will power all of those improvements.

My vision for the future says we, as an industry, will be much smarter about understanding who is a likely prospect and able to send them timely and compelling communications that are based on behavioral patterns rather than guestimated patterns. We will do a lot to help shoppers focus in on the vehicle that really best meets their desired criteria by developing much more intuitive configuration services. In doing so, we can wring inefficiencies, frustrations and hours out of the purchase process, which will take place increasingly, though maybe not completely, online, whether it occurs in a just-in-time build-to-order manufacturing context or even in a continuation of today’s make-inventory-available context. I also believe the industry will continue to move closer and closer, if not all the way there, to one-price.  Finally, I have no doubt and lots of optimism about the one-to-one highly personal and exactly timed communication dealers will be able to send to their owner bodies, primarily through personalized communication devices that will be even more ubiquitous than they are already today.

Said another way, my vision for the future says that we can make it easier to buy a car, easier to buy the right car, and easier to own a car.

I believe we can do all of this more efficiently and for less money than dealers spend today.  Today, dealers are trapped in the dying days of traditional media, using a mix of marketing capabilities owned by one long-standing monopolistic player after another.  Pay for performance, highly measurable, digital media offers dealers not just a better value but, at least for the foreseeable future, the opportunity to participate in a highly-fragmented media mix where price and value derived are inextricably connected and, for the most part, priced by the advertiser and not the media owner.

It’s hard in today’s macro-economic environment to say better days are ahead, but I truly believe they are, just as I have since I started Cobalt in 1995.  Marketing and customer services built on the Internet backbone will help dealers and their customers alike for decades to come.

The Cobalt Group
www.cobalt.com
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