Recent
results from surveys conducted by CARMAX and Capital One Auto Finance,
concluded that women continue to be unsatisfied with their car buying
experiences. The fact that 80% of all car buying decisions are
influenced by women and 50% of all new car purchases are made by women,
suggests that the market for women buyers represented $80 billion
dollars of new car sales, reported in 2005, (source NADA data). These
numbers are rather disturbing considering that women are still buying
50% of the automobiles, yet their car buying experiences have not
improved according to these recent surveys.
Here is a recent quote from an article written on www.askpatty.com by Toby Bloomberg, Co-Owner of a well respected marketing Diva Marketing Blog
on how to market to women, “As a card carrying Diva, I must admit I
love to shop. Shoes, clothes, books, music I even like grocery
shopping. However, there have been a few traumatic experiences in my
shopping life and several of those were centered around car shopping”.
It
appears dealerships are definitely selling cars to women; The question
is, will they “be back” to the same dealership for their next car
purchase as a loyal happy customer?
Several recent trends
promise better results from dealerships and dealership groups who are
taking these recent survey results seriously and “get” that women are
controlling much of the profitability of dealerships through their
growing “buying power’.
Here are some of the strategies emerging from dealerships to improve customer satisfaction scores from women consumers
*Recruiting, hiring and training additional female sales and service advisors.
*Holding workshops and clinics for women to educate women on car care, financing, service and maintenance.
*Giving flowers, gift baskets and spa treatments to women as thank you gifts for new car purchases.
To
take the word ‘traumatic” entirely out of women’s comments about their
car buying experiences, dealerships need to listen to what women want
and need and learn create a way to make buying a car as pleasant and
rewarding as their other retail shopping experiences.
Many
women really love to shop and here lies one of the problems when
“dealership salesman” and “woman shopper” collide at the dealership.
When a woman says “I am just shopping”, 90 % of the time she really
means she is just shopping! The well honed and trained super dealer #1
professional salesman takes these words, “I am just shopping” as a
battle cry. Mr. Car Salesman immediately decides to take the challenge
and take out his bag of dealer sales tactics and do whatever it takes
to close the deal before she escapes! She may even end up actually
buying a car, but in the end somehow ‘feels’ manipulated and frustrated
because she was not able to complete her mission and complete her due
diligence and research by ‘shopping’ before she makes her buying
decision. Will she buy again at this dealership and report a good
experience, I think not.
Communication and listening differences
between car dealerships and consumer women are what I believe to be a
‘core’ issue dealerships need to address. By providing ongoing required
educational training to adjust or modify sales tactics will insure the
“buying power” of consumer women come in to dealership showrooms and
stay there.
In part two of this series on how to sell cars
to women I will discuss more on communicating with women consumers,
effective advertising and marketing tactics to women consumers and
provide some additional resources for dealers.
About Deborah Renshaw:
Deborah
Renshaw a native of Bowling Green Kentucky, highest ranked female
Professional NASCAR race car driver, Graduate of Northwood University
Midland, Michigan Campus, graduate of the NADA Academy, daughter of
dealer principle Dan Renshaw, Renshaw Automotive Group, heads up the
advisory panel of expert automotive women for Ask Patty.Com, Inc.
(www.askpatty.com).
About Ask Patty:
Ask Patty is a safe place for women to get advice on car purchases, maintenance and other automotive related topics.