Every year, there are buzzwords that stand out and get overused to the point that people no longer want to hear about them. In recent years, we’ve heard plenty about “the cloud”, we’ve taken too many “selfies”, every company is shooting for “sustainability”, and they’re all highlighted on social media with “#hashtags”.
There’s another buzzword that people are sick of hearing, yet it might be the one that needs a much deeper exploration, especially in the automotive industry. It’s “big data” and most in the car business haven’t taken advantage of what it can do for them. That needs to change in 2015.
To be more specific, there’s a distinct need for the data to be properly analyzed and turned into actionable data that can drive the industry’s advertising decisions. It’s already happening at the top with manufacturers and their advertising agencies utilizing it like a Gieger counter to identify areas of opportunity. In 2015, car dealers need to do the same.
Concepts like big data and business intelligent may be foreign to many dealers. They all hear about analytics and they get flooded with reports and dashboards to log into, but few are combining the data in a meaningful way to draw conclusions about where and how to market their vehicles. It’s not that they don’t want to. They simply haven’t had the tools available to them… or have they?
Automotive market research firm String Automotive has brought it all together in the form of their Dealer Positioning System (DPS). It takes the data available through analytics, Polk Automotive, Experian, Dataium, and other sources and analyzes it holistically to produce recommendations to dealers about their marketing and advertising activities. Through the DPS, dealers are able to identify specific markets all the way down to zip codes in order to know which vehicles are being sought, which advertising mediums are working best, and what messages are most likely to resonate in the area.
This is important to more than just the dealers. As consumers, we’re inundated with advertising in the real world and online, most of which has nothing to do with us. It’s both ineffective and annoying. More importantly, it’s usually unnecessary. The blanket approach to advertising is to blame and business intelligence is the way to keep it from happening.
We’re not in a world like the one in the movie Minority Report where the advertisements are catered to us individually, but proper data analysis makes it possible for us to be closer than ever before.
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