Marketing: Rethinking Auto Showrooms: Shark Tanks, Anyone? November 1, 2006
Automobile companies are experimenting with new ways of selling, trying to replace the image of standardized buildings and high-pressure salesmen.
Correction Appended
TO Eddie Sotto, Ferraris are like teddy bears. “You know the teddy bears you win at the carnival ball game?” he asked. “Knock down the milk bottles, win a bear? That’s what the Ferraris are like at Wynn resort.”
That is why Mr. Sotto installed the Ferrari Maserati dealership outside the casino at Steve Wynn’s $2.7 billion hotel in Las Vegas. Those who hit the jackpot need to only step out of the casino to claim their prize – a new supercar.
“It is a place where it could suddenly become achievable for the average person to get the car,” Mr. Sotto said.
Mr. Sotto helps devise ideas for selling cars, borrowed from theme parks and other unlikely sources. Mr. Sotto, who calls himself an “experiential designer” and worked as an “imagineer” for Disney before opening his own company, Sotto Studios, in 2003, advises businesses on how to sell cars in new ways. What he learned from creating Main Street for Euro Disney and Pooh’s Hunny Hunt ride in Tokyo he now applies to selling automobiles.
The average car dealer, Mr. Sotto said, is pretty basic. “Get some cars and put them in a white room with some windows,” he said.
“But for Steve Wynn, the cars were like art to be framed,” Mr. Sotto said. “He has an art gallery in the casino, too.”
So popular did the Ferrari Maserati dealership at Wynn Las Vegas turn out to be that management imposed a $10 admission fee. “We had to,” Mr. Sotto said, “just to keep the crowd manageable.”
Customers who have not played the slots can settle for Ferrari leather items or the crank shaft of a Formula 1 racer in the accessory department.
Automobile companies are experimenting with untraditional ways of selling, trying to replace the image of standardized buildings and fast-talking, high-pressure salesmen that has been the perennial image of the business.
It can be as simple as a fresh location: Land Rover, Jaguar, Bentley, Audi and other makes install cars in shopping malls. BMW opened a dealership on Wall Street to catch the attention of brokers and bankers with big bonuses. Audi has opened a space called the Audi Forum on Park Avenue at 47th Street, not far, as a lawyer strolls at lunch, from the Mercedes/Maybach or Ferrari Maserati showrooms, also on Park.
Automotive News recently reported that a Lincoln and Toyota dealer in Ashland, Ky., installed a cafe and a shark tank to lure buyers. At another dealer, owners can get a manicure while waiting for their cars to be serviced.
Mr. Sotto grew up obsessed with Disneyland. But at 19, he found himself selling appliances. “I had just gotten married, and with a new young wife it was not a career choice but a matter of survival,” he recalled.
“I learned it is the same process, whether you are selling things for $1 or $1 million.”
Just as today’s appliances have changed – premium Subzero or Garland have supplanted generic Kenmore – “automobiles are image,” Mr. Sotto said. “A car says something about a person.”
For the Aston Martin dealership at Galpin Ford in Van Nuys, Calif., Mr. Sotto and the owner, Beau Boeckmann, thought about James Bond, who drives Astons in some of his most memorable films. Mr. Sotto designed the dealership as “the Aston Martin vault” on the Bond theme. The cars are shown off inside a giant bank vault; admission is by special card and fingerprint reader.
“Aston customers really like their privacy,” Mr. Sotto said. “They want to sit and be relaxed without lots of other people marching through. They want a salesman who isn’t getting phone calls every few seconds.”
The Aston vault is conceived more like a nightclub than the appliance store where Mr. Sotto once worked. The idea was to make it like a cocktail bar, the salesman more like a host than a dealmaker.
But since each car is heavily customized with wood or leather, there was another metaphor: “Why not take Cartier or Tiffany as metaphor?” he said. “Instead we would show off the cars like jewelry, like a counter at Tiffany, with burled wood cabinets and velvet trays, a fireplace and the right color of halogen light.”
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- Author : arnold
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