1.6 trillion. That’s the estimated global sales value of a product that we are all very familiar with. A gigantic business — with rapidly changing technology, sales, marketing, and distribution. New business models. Intricate buying processes. Affecting virtually everybody. Lots of interesting stories. Totally ignored by most marketing and advertising media. Yep, it's about used cars.
Today, the market for used cars is highly competitive, dominated by large, increasingly effective multi-brand, multi-branch dealerships. One large car distributor sells around one million cars every year. So, big business alright.
But … why don’t popular marketing and advertising media write about it? One reason might be that they don’t know how.
New cars make big news, and offer a distinct pack of functions, features, and performance metrics, easy to compare and comment upon. In contrast, used cars comprise an incredible mix of brands, models, and engine versions, and not least year models. Difficult to write about, until you see the game changers.
”Uniform, static, predictable, and boring ads”
A car may last 20 years or more, and be sold and bought half a dozen times before the final trip to the scrapyard. Consequently, every single used car in a car retailer's online showroom is more or less unique. They have to be promoted individually, featuring different things to attract and engage the right buyer. Which would of course be unrealistic because of the costs involved.
This is also why conventional used car advertising has been so uniform, predictable, static and boring. Even after moving online. And ”uniform, predictable, static, and boring” is not exactly what attractive, engaging, effective advertising is about, is it?
The answer: Mass-customisation
But this hugely expensive inefficiency in a market valued at 1.6 trillion dollars is rapidly coming to an end. Because it’s a perfect case for a marketing strategy known as mass-customisation.
A Swedish SaaS company, Phyron is offering a plug-in service for fully automated production, managing, and publishing of advanced AI video ads. An entire ecosystem for online car advertising already used by leading car dealerships in at least 25 countries.
