Some 36 hours after completing this editor’s letter,
if all goes well, I will be boarding a plane to Atlanta for my
annual holiday in the States.
While I will generally be trying to
take the opportunity not to think about car finance for a couple of
weeks, I have to say I will be keeping my eye on the TV ads (not a
hard thing to do in such a commercially drenched broadcast culture)
to witness the art of US auto finance commercials.
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While much dealer and manufacturer
advertising in this country makes mention of headline offers from
captives, and billboard ads increasingly quote prices per month
rather than in full, it would be a rare thing indeed to see a
television or radio ad entirely devoted to the offerings of an
independent finance house.
If our lenders did advertise on TV, I
imagine the resulting broadcasts would be full of kindly
voiceovers, soft-focus shots of people with reassuring smiles
holding out car keys, and imagery promoting a sense of security,
stability and responsibility.
Not so in the United States.
I recently had my mind completely
blown by the excellent Alex Cooke, head of sales for the Montrose
Automotive Group in Ohio, who was kind enough to show me a reel of
ads produced by his group.
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By GlobalDataThey were arresting to say the least,
and verging on alarming to my sedate British sensibilities.
Booming voices, reverb, spinning text;
promises of cash guarantees if Montrose could not get you into a
car somehow. They were compelling, they were loud, and they were in
another world to UK motor finance.
Rather than describe them further, I
insist that you see for yourself. I don’t want to be like that one
person at a party who insists on showing everyone YouTube videos on
their phone, but I really think you should take a moment to type in
these URLs and see what you are missing. Go ahead, I’ll wait for
you.
Check out the first video here
Quite something, no? First things
first: we all know that this is not something we can directly
replicate in the UK.
Our consumer culture, the risk
appetite of our sector, and of course our stricter regulatory
environment rule out a lot of what is being done here. For example,
I can hardly see British lenders targeting the recently bankrupt as
a demographic.
However, there is something brilliant
about this advertising that is eminently reproducible in the UK –
because in the States it’s getting people calling up and walking
into dealerships, wanting to talk about finance before anything
else.
That $100 dollar inducement, for
example, is a powerful thing. Sure, Cooke told me, Montrose is
happy to pay $100 to customers who just can’t be financed, since
the possibility of the payout brings in far more leads who do end
up being signed to workable deals.
Yes, this kind of tactic is most
applicable to the British subprime sector, but the wider principle
is a lesson for the whole of dealer finance.
With finance becoming more and more
important as a way to move metal, why on earth are dealers missing
the chance to generate finance leads?
So many forecourt man-hours are lost
selling vehicles that consumers end up not being able to borrow
enough to afford.
Why not get people to come in and get
approved for finance, and then show them the cars? It would avoid a
lot of consumer disappointment, and a lot of wasted time.
Direct marketing by dealers, focused
entirely on finance, is a bold and potentially winning move that
many would argue needs to be taken in this country.
Maybe we can’t pull off the sturm
und drang that saturates advertising on the other side of the
Atlantic, but we can find much to respect and emulate in it all the
same.
Fred Crawley
fred.crawley@vrlfinancialnews.com
