Why Trusted Expertise Matters
I write for a living. I also shoot photography, appear on video, and content strategize for multiple clients, but I identify as a writer, and I have for 20 years.
From the time I was a child I’ve loved cars. Mom tells me my first word was “car.” Dad took us on road trips all over the United States, leaving Alaska and North Dakota the only states that I still need to check off the list. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to get my driver’s license, and to explore, and to drift my gifted piece-of-shit Mercury Monarch around corners in the snow.
Luckily, I’ve married my love of the automobile and travel with an ability to put coherent sentences together, and I’ve made a career out of it. Decades of automotive study, a short stint as a car salesperson, and 20 years of reviewing cars, talking to designers and engineers, and continually sifting through facts and figures has resulted in a degree of expertise about the subject.
Check me out, all old-school with a paper subscription to Car and Driver magazine that shows up in my mailbox, delivered by a human being driving a funny-looking little truck.
This is the December 2015 issue, opened to an article titled “Three’s a Crowd” by James Cobb and Norman Mayersohn. The article discusses what the authors characterize as an upcoming battle between car companies, dealerships, and consumer websites for the digital affections of modern car buyers.
Citing the departure earlier this year of a massive national dealership group called AutoNation from a massive dealership lead-generation network called TrueCar so that the former could better compete with the latter, as well as digital sales initiatives operated by Ford, General Motors, and Toyota, Cobb and Mayersohn conclude that both automakers and dealerships are increasingly interested in cutting out “the middleman,” what is known in the industry as a third-party consumer automotive website.
It is not until the middle of the last paragraph that Cobb and Mayersohn explain to the reader why I’m not terribly worried about finding a new career: “…the independents have vast member networks, an established track record, online expertise, user trust, and a reach that encompasses all brands and models.”
Expertise. Trust. Reach.
Will car buyers trust the experts at the car dealership? What about the car company that wants to sell them a car? And how will they easily compare, say, an Accord and a Camry?
Proving the point that trusted expertise matters, the advertising on the opposite page of the article attempts to sell the perceived merits of the Toyota Corolla S to the car enthusiasts who read Car and Driver.
“Clutch in. Boredom out. It’s time to put the fun back in driving. The 2016 Corolla brings even more excitement to your drive, thanks to an available 6-speed manual transmission. Stir the driver in you.”
Ugh. I’ve driven a Corolla S with a stick. This red one, reviewed for AutoWeb. The entire week I had that car in my possession, I wished it had the available continuously variable transmission (CVT). And I’m a guy who has owned manual-transmission vehicles since 1988. If you are a driving enthusiast who wants a small, fun car with great manual gearbox, check out a Ford Focus, a Mazda 3 or a Volkswagen Golf GTI.
Do you trust my expertise on this matter? Or do you trust Toyota’s?
Dealerships have an even harder time earning consumer trust, and it is their own damn fault.
In the decades that have passed since I worked the lot at Camelback Ford in Phoenix, dealerships have been proclaiming that they’ve reformed their business practices and that the customer’s needs come first. This must be why, on September 14, 2015, Automotive News ran an article titled: “Why it’s time to rethink gouging.”
Evidently, federal, state, and local regulators are investigating dealerships for fraud related to what are known as “F&I products.” Sold by a dealership’s finance and insurance office, these F&I products are designed to add hundreds or thousands of dollars of pure profit into a car purchase. Examples include extended warranties, service contracts, roadside assistance programs, Lojack, anti-theft window etching, paint protection treatments…the list is a long one.
Apparently, some dealerships were charging customers as much as $6,000 for products that cost the dealer less than $300, and occasionally without the customer’s knowledge.
That’s not a good way to build trust.
Last summer, while waiting for the Nissan dealership in Oxnard, California to fix, for the third time in two weeks, the rear hatch on my wife’s Murano, I noticed a dealership addendum sticker next to the factory window sticker on a brand new Nissan Versa Sedan.
The Versa Sedan is Nissan’s entry-level car. It is designed to give people with very little money a basic, roomy, functional, dependable, and efficient vehicle. Yet the Versa SV on this Nissan dealership’s lot, the one with a Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) of $16,725, was marked up to $19,699.
Say whaaaaaaaaat?
The dealership wanted $1,195 for Finishing Touch, an exterior and interior protection treatment. Nitrogen-filled tires ran $395. A two-year maintenance program cost $384. And then the dealership asked for “Additional Dealer Markup” of $1,000.
Talk about big, hairy balls.
What pisses me off about this isn’t that the dealership has the gall to do this. They are free to run their business in any way they want. In my opinion, if you are buying a new car, and you see something like this, leave that dealership immediately unless you want every single person that you encounter to try to bend you over their desk.
What makes me mad is that the hard-working, low-wage workers with extremely tight budgets who might find a Nissan Versa appealing in the first place are the last people who can afford to fork over nearly $3,000 extra for nothing but crap. Or, as in the case of the “Additional Dealer Markup” line item, literally nothing.
Keep up the good work, dealerships. Glad to know nothing has changed since the days when I’d let my customers think a $1,000 discount on a Ford Taurus station wagon represented a great deal.
When consulting and strategizing with my clients, I emphasize the requirement that their content must reflect accuracy and expertise, because only then can users of that content ascribe authority to a publication.
Consistently accurate and authoritative content builds trust, and if that content connects key pieces of information in a unique, meaningful, and compelling way, it forms the foundation necessary for customer loyalty, brand influence, and what us old farts like to call “word-of-mouth” promotion.
Today, the same thing is known as social sharing, because people apparently no longer have face-to-face conversations with one another. Except maybe on Snapchat.
Given the quality of some of the native advertising I’ve seen from car companies, and the inherent desire of dealerships to separate you from as much of your cash as is possible, it is quite clear to me that trusted expertise still matters, perhaps now more than ever.
But then, I have a vested interest in making that statement, don’t I?
Christian Wardlaw has 20 years of experience as an automotive journalist. Today, you can find his work on AutoWeb, Car Gurus, J.D. Power Cars, New York Daily News, and Overstock Cars.
Magazine and Toyota Corolla photos copyright Speedy Daddy Media, Inc.
Nissan Versa photo copyright Nissan North America; for editorial use only
