22 January, as many of you no doubt were informed, was "Blue Monday" – the most depressing day of the year as determined, we are told, by a horribly clever scientific equation. For me, however, the only depressing thing about the day was the amount of overage such obviously fatuous non-science merited.
The equation in question was cooked up a few years ago by a Dr Cliff Arnall, who was commissioned to do so by a travel company looking for a "sciencey" hook for a press release.
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Anyone with a professional interest in reading this column is likely to be in a job requiring a good head for figures and a healthy cynicism, so I won’t waste your time explaining why an "equation" comparing values such as "weather", "motivational levels" and "time since failure to keep new year’s resolution" is a load of hot air.
And yet Twitter was awash with the #Bluemonday hashtag all through the 22nd. Laughably, 90% of those using the hashtag were businesses making tenuous links between their products and cheeriness in order to mine web hits from consumers buying into the Blue Monday phenomenon.
But consumers, on the whole, realised the "equation" was bunk and didn’t waste much time reading tweets about it – or following links. This left the hashtag unused save for legions of marketing professionals bellowing adverts into the silence, and looking rather insincere as a result.
If any business tweeting "Beat the #Bluemonday blues with our range of mugs with weak puns on them" or similar managed to do anything other than make itself look cynical, I’d be hugely surprised. Marketing Monday, as I will now think of it, shows how important it is for a company’s marketing strategy to respect the intelligence of its customers.
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By GlobalDataI mention all this because it seems the F&I selling process is experiencing a change in the balance of power in favour of the consumer. I think Mark Squires, chief executive of Benfield Motor Group, hit the nail on the head at November’s FLA motor finance conference, when he posited that dealers could be seeing the end of the "controlled" selling process.
Squires said he’s changed his whole marketing strategy to focus on the customer as controlling how the industry sells, and has been able to provide the web – and conversion – metrics to prove he’s getting it right.
He pointed out that, according to 2012 Google research, the average car buyer was making only 1.3 dealership visits but surveying 18 websites before purchase, including social media and peer review sites.
With this in mind, Benfield was giving motoring bloggers test drives and posting information – and specifically not advertising – in videos on You Tube. (Compare this approach to the #bluemonday example of how not to market in social media.) In 2011, Benfield had more Twitter followers than some of the brands it sold.
I’m no marketing expert, but I can certainly agree with this sort of thinking from a consumer’s perspective. As a buyer, I know I’m always more engaged when a company uses its marketing to demonstrate what it knows, rather than hitching a ride on an online bandwagon and hoping it will arrive at The Next Big Thing.
The single biggest change in web marketing since its inception has been the increased necessity for companies to reach out to their customers and prove themselves, rather than simply commanding potential buyers to come to their websites and be awed.
While the trouble experienced by Tesco cars and other online ventures suggests that the physical forecourt will remain the place where auto sales are closed, the F&I industry should not be considered immune from the changes that are sweeping the world of sales as a result of consumers’ changing online expectations.
fred.crawley@timetric.com
