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Cars.com Wolf Commercial

Linda, I appreciate your comments. I showed this to my daughter and son-in-law and they both liked it. Neither thought that it put dealerships in a negative light.
I don't know Tom but Yago and Joe haven't seen sunlight in months and I assume that has had an effect.
 
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Linda, I appreciate your comments. I showed this to my daughter and son-in-law and they both liked it. Neither thought that it put dealerships in a negative light.
I don't know Tom but Yago and Joe haven't seen sunlight in months and I assume that has had an effect.

I'm in FL and get into light occasionally. I am also still involved in retail web sales, as well as a working with a vendor. When I compare our industry to others heavily marketed by lead services, ours is the only one where the referral companies promote themselves by directly or indirectly putting down the industry.

Hard to picture a legal hotline talking about lawyers creating drama.
 
Tom,

I am with you especially when it comes to CarFax, Edmunds and TrueCar (more that have slipped my mind).

The thing is, I didn't see it with this commercial. It was obviously a Cars.com commercial designed to promote themselves.

The "drama" (going back in forth with a faceless manager) is what customers hate about the car business. I thought that the commercial addressed this. "Oh, you want drama" and out came the wolf pup. Again, as a guy that used market-based pricing, I didn't have room to be going back and forth. Our negotiations were presenting and justifying market values. I've lost deals because we didn't or couldn't negotiate the price. I love a commercial that talks about reviews because mine were good.
 
And considering the average rating of dealer reviews on our site is about 4.4 out of 5, and over 80% are positive, we know that dealers are doing an incredible job in the dealership, and we can play a big role in helping close that consumer perception gap.

Linda,

80% positive seems high. Should Cars.com consider a better filtering program?
 
Ha, good one, Doug. What’s great is dealers are focusing so much on customer service. Even better, customers are noticing and commenting on their experience! Back to consumer perception, every great experience at a dealership lends itself to closing the perception gap we talked about earlier.
Blake, to your point, authenticity of reviews is something that’s important to us and we’re constantly improving our filtering process to ensure integrity of those reviews. Sometimes though, there are ways to game the system (so to speak), and while it’s certainly the exception versus the rule, it’s something every reviews site must look out for. While each situation is unique, generally when we see differences in review scores between Cars.com and other review sites, like Google+ local, it’s because the dealership actively promotes one platform over others. Without getting way too detailed on our fraud monitoring tactics (could take up the whole blog) we’re confident in the screening measures we’ve put in place.
 
We have to help these customers along. After all, we don't want them to make a mistake like forgetting my name. I am curious to why Cars.com changed the position of the customer reviews. I believe that you could see it from the SRP. Now, it is at the very bottom of the VDP ....am I wrong?
 
... Sometimes though, there are ways to game the system (so to speak), and while it’s certainly the exception versus the rule, it’s something every reviews site must look out for. ....

YA THINK??? There are companies whose entire business plan is predicated on it, not to mention more than a few dedicated staff members... Without google algorithm quality programmers it's a given. Of course, like hackers, eventually companies will be forced to hire these professional gamers. IMHO, of course