RE: Baggott: I’m hoping to korma the market with my new kind of takeaway

[MAldridge 1]

One focus we are seeing is the Appleisation' of the retail environment which I personally think is very flawed in it's ideas. Yes your brand spanking new main dealer is plush with clean lines etc. just like an Apple shop but the whole idea is the interaction with the product. This simply cannot be replicated to the dealership model. Cars cannot be driven in a showroom. Equally people wonder into an Apple store, they make people gravitate to them. A 4 year old loves to play angry birds for 5 mins whilst you are pulling them around Debenhams and I like checking the football scores because normally shopping centres have non existent phone signal!

And when it comes to buying a phone I buy Apple because of those experiences I have had with the product, maybe not entirely but I have tried them in their shops and they are very user friendly.

I think the industry suffers from a lack of footfall that is spontaneous and also it's approach to footfall.

A well known main dealer near a busy shopping hub suffers from high levels of this kind of footfall and blames it for it's problems with CSI etc.

The whole dealership approach for me is flawed. Tesla are getting it spot on in regards to placing themselves in a retail environment in Westfield.

I appreciate a car is a high ticket good but most cars are now financed anyway not making them the bulky life changing decisions they once were.

[James Baggott 227]

Interesting stuff. I was chatting to Brewer at the weekend at a Mitsubishi event and he made me laugh with his summary of an Apple store...

 

'Nowhere can you enter a store and see a massive queue of people clutching broken items waiting to talk to 'Genius Bar' staff that are completely and utterly invisible to those shelling out hundreds of pounds for the exact same products in the front of the store. If you walked into PC World and saw a massive queue at customer services of people clutching broken PCs you wouldn't think to yourself "Do you know what? I really want one of THOSE computers that break..."

 

He has a point. Love or loathe Apple you can't deny their genius at marketing...

[James Baggott 227]

This was my latest business brainwave. I have many of those. Most fail.

Have you ever thought about branching out from cars and doing something else? I'd love to hear about your brilliant, and not so brilliant, business ideas...

[MAldridge 1]

Well I think I am in a unique position. I myself deal with Recruitment specifically for the motor trade (I have no plan on using this forum as a hawking opportunity for what it's worth) so I come from an outside looking in background myself. I do find a lot of people seem to go into recruitment from a motor trade background with varying levels of success.

 

I once knew a DP who went to go set up his own sweet shop though. That deserves a few puns. 

[Ed Legge 2]

"What if you asked someone – completely removed from the business of selling cars – what they would do to improve your car dealership?"

 

There's a simple answer to this. The most important thing is the way people are treated - so the the dealer staff are the "glue". It doesn't matter what technologies you use or how you spend on slick showrooms if you don't get back to people fast enough and treat them in the way in which they expect to be treated.

 

When you go into a dealership do you feel like a valued customer or a profit opportunity?

 

Apple's marketing may feel like genius, but it's nothing many luxury brands haven't achieved many years earlier. I like Mike Brewer's take on an Apple store - sounds just like a Land Rover dealership....

[umesh 336]

James ! You're alone thinking wild ideas all the times !

Strange but I look at so many other business and keep thinking " If Only they did this or that , how much better it would be for the customer , and how much more money they could make..... "

I guess to us ' outsiders' it appears all to easy, but in reality with other business they have their headaches and wonder how they could improve  their services , get more customers, be more efficient, make more money etc etc.

In my frustration a few years ago of receiving  poor service from restaurants I had this website built ! www.therestaurantinspector.co.uk  but due to lack of time not done much with it! [ I have so many ideas for restaurants I could write a book ! ]

[Andy Entwistle 96]

Microsoft have got some really interesting views they are going to be  sharing at the conference on the future trends of retail outlets in the automotive industry, i think they have a couple of really interesting ideas....