• by Joan Voight , April 2, 2008

Saturn drives Web traffic right into the showroom

While tough times mean some brands hunker down and stick to the tried-and-true, auto marketers don't have that luxury. They have yet to catch up with the 70 percent of auto shoppers who research car purchases online. It's finally time to say good-bye to any illusion that they, and their outdated sales tactics, are controlling the car-buying experience. According to a 2007 DoubleClick survey, 53 percent of auto buyers used the Internet as their primary source for gathering purchase information.

Net Result

Where does a virtual auto showroom end and a real-world showroom begin? At Saturn's new dealerships, it will all depend. General Motors' Saturn is revamping its dealerships to welcome Net-savvy buyers who expect online information at their fingertips when they visit an auto showroom. Faced with the fact that the majority of car shoppers conduct research and comparison-shop online, the carmaker is redesigning its showrooms around workstations with online PCs and Wi-Fi hotspots.

Shoppers are welcome to fire up their own PCs or use the Saturn computers for research. While sitting in a showroom, consumers will be able to check features on a Scion or Dodge and see if they can get them in a Saturn, read customer reviews of the Saturn model right in front of them, or look up the palette of a favorite designer to pick colors for their new car. When they want instant feedback, they can send pictures or information to faraway friends. On Saturn's own site, showroom shoppers can estimate their budgets, figure out their car payments and apply for credit - all without talking to a single human.

The new showroom design debuted in fall 2007 in Danbury, Conn., and the company plans to revamp its other 440 showrooms throughout this year and into 2009.

Up to now, Internet access at Saturn dealerships has been informal and sporadic. Calls to a random selection of West Coast dealers, for instance, showed some had Wi-Fi zones, others had older PCs available and one suggested his customers use the Starbucks across the street.

Saturn's new retail strategy is "to empower customers and allow them to interact with the brand as they want to," says Chris Bower, Saturn's manager of retail strategies. It is a distinct difference from the automaker's past approach of sales personnel "nurturing" customers. Now, instead of Saturn's sales staff being at the center of the retail experience, the consumer calls the shots.

Offering showroom shoppers the Internet is a response to changes in the brand's target market, says Bower. Compared to Saturn buyers pre-2006, they are younger, more affluent, more educated and care more about style and performance, he says. Company research showed Saturn's target is also "urban, educated, open-minded, progressive and mostly female," adds Bower. The company is attempting to offer that group more independence than they will find in rival (read: Toyota and Honda) showrooms.

To come up with its new approach, Saturn worked with innovation strategy firm Jump Associates, touring dozens of design-oriented stores in California and Michigan, such as Apple, Whole Foods and American Apparel, looking for inspiration and cutting-edge experiences. The company then unveiled a prototype dealership design and gave tours of the prototype to about 40 consumers who fit the target profile. Rather than ask the participants what they liked, the company observed how the consumer interacted with the components of the space, says Bower.

All that input was channeled into the final Saturn showroom design, modeled after an interactive museum where visitors learn by experimenting and the sales staff takes a backseat.

Besides the online stations, the new dealerships offer magnetic paint strips that can be applied to any floor model and user-controlled animations of the cars' inner workings projected on the outside of an actual vehicle.

"In changing the script of the in-person auto retail experience, companies like Saturn need to think about translating Internet car shopping into the physical world," says Dev Patnaik, founder of Jump Associates. "We looked at ways to make shopping habits that were pioneered on the Internet better because they are in-person. Auto buyers don't leave behind their assumptions from online shopping when they walk into the showroom - rather they wonder why the [showroom] hasn't caught up to the Internet."

Stark, Craving Mad

Honda America looked to expand the Crave-themed ad campaign for its CR-V with an online game that could personalize users' non-automotive cravings, such as chocolate and video games, while still showing off the car. Crave is a play on words mixing the model's name with the notion of desire to arrive at CRaVe. The campaign, launched in September 2006 by Honda's agency, RPA, juxtaposes popular wants, such as ice cream, with the auto and targets young, active consumers who are single or just starting their families, according to RPA.

The game that RPA came up with launched on crave.honda.com in November. In it, a dashboard navigation screen asks you 20 questions, after which it "guesses" your craving, and shows you an image of what it is by lifting the hatchback on a CR-V.

Honda is hoping to build buzz based on the uncanny accuracy - or amusing near-accuracy - of the game's guesses. As part of the overall campaign, Honda paid for links to show up on searches for everything from "Labradors," and "coffee" to "pizza." RPA mined data from tools like Yahoo's Buzz Index to select terms that are not just crave-related, but also skewed to CR-V's target audience. A combination of these crave-related keywords and AUV category keywords generated about 500,000 visits to the microsite within the first month, according to Mike Margolin, RPA's interactive marketing director.

Based on that response, the company tweaked the search marketing to include links to the game on listings for craveable topics. So when you are searching for jewelry, video games, celebrity gossip or other desirable items, within the search listings you get links to the site and a phrase such as "Honda CR-V is so in tune with your lifestyle that it can even guess what you're craving right now. Play Crave Reader and watch it read your mind."

Sure, Honda's campaign is a bit of a guessing game, with keywords that hope to surprise, rather than target. Saturn's experiment to hand over the keys to the Web-search kingdom, right there in the showroom, is a bit more of a safe bet. But in general, automakers desperate to get up close and personal with skittish buyers are finding fresh ways online to do that.