Branding is a hot button. It’s pushed as the best way to create an individual identity or your dealership. Whether it involves a slogan, a physical image, or a location, branding has benefits, of that there’s no doubt. But branding your dealership can be detrimental if it’s not done well. Here’s an example of what I mean:

A Poorly Positioned Brand

A dealership’s brand is ‘Your Big City Dealer with Small Town Pricing’. That’s not too bad, kind of catchy. It’s a message from a rural dealer just outside a major city. They position themselves as equals but with the capacity to undercut any sales deal you’ll get from the urban dealerships.

However, they’ve created their own metric; a way you can measure your experience at the dealership. And unfortunately, in the automotive industry that’s dominated by commission sales, it’s not a promise you can make to your customers. Shopping between dealers is commonplace, and the ‘Big City Dealer with Small Town Pricing’ has pigeon-holed their branding into a losing proposition.

Any customer that gets a better deal elsewhere has immediately associated your store with a fallacy. Your store hasn’t come through for them according to your brand’s promise. It’s not only poorly positioned – the brand is based on pricing alone – but it’s unrealistic to provide that experience to each customer that comes through the door.

Make Your Brand an Achievable Mission Statement

A mission statement isn’t a destination but rather the road on which you’re traveling. It’s a consistent path that you can always find your way back to. That’s what a brand should be as well, and it should be evergreen. That means that ten years from now, twenty years from now, or even longer, your brand should be as applicable as it is today.

If your branding is about an experience, it must be one you can promise for every single client or visitor that comes through your showroom doors, browses your website, or visits your service department. Here are a few things you CAN’T promise in your brand:

- You can’t promise to always have the best pricing. Someone is always going to try to undercut you and positioning yourself based on a best-price brand only takes gross profit out of your pocket.

- You can’t commit to being the most convenient. Current and potential customers have options, many of which may be more convenient in their personal situations.

-You can’t promise anything definitive like being the ‘ONLY’ anything. You just don’t know when something else comes along, and you’ll have to change your brand again.

Base Your Brand on Something Experiential

Let’s look at that sample again. They’re only one word away from a really good brand message: ‘Your Big City Dealer with Small Town Service’. Everyone understands the ‘small-town service’ image of being friendly and personal. Those are characteristics you can reasonably promise that a customer can experience at your store. However, it means that the small-town service experience has to be the one overriding motivator for everything in your dealership. Whether it’s the sales experience, the service drive experience, or the parts guy at the counter, everyone needs to understand and undertake the brand message as their own.

It comes down to being who you say you are, and if you can deliver it consistently, that’s a message you can hang your hat on.