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QR Codes - In or Out?

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#321
ddavis said:
Yes, a lawyer from Harvard. That should tell you all you need to know.

I am convinced that most dealers are not interested. They might read it but it is another thing for them to implement it.

I was on a website, this morning. I looked at their new and used car special pages and incentive page and they were blank. Looking at their used cars, they only had 7 pictures and no descriptions. I looked for them on AutoTrader and they were an Alpha dealer but the new cars were listed on the 7th page in the featured section. Again, no descriptions. New cars were at MSRP. Used cars were without descriptions and priced out of market. Why spend the money?

You know how Jerry does the phone shopping? One of the companies, that I represent, does the same thing with emails. You get a report with all of the responses, response times etc.. You still see dealerships that never contact the customer, don't answer the questions, don't quote a price, response times in hours and days, "one and they're done" responses. Wonder why customers become non-responsive? They figured your guy was an idiot after the first response. Dealers want to look at what the competition's templates and prices look like but when they see the rest, they often come unhinged. Remember those nightmare internet reports from the manufacturers? It ain't any better.
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But in the end... many dealers sell cars and stay afloat anyway, right?

Or is it that this new change that we face (technology implemented into the small business) has not had enough time to destroy the business that stays behind?

Will the landscape change dramatically a few years from now number of dealers wise as the start and powerful ones absorb the others?

The crisis has been an eye opener to the fact that it took a lot of dealers out but not based on make, or location, or on other factors that we may want to see. The crisis took right away those with weak digital strategies and with teams of people that could not react fast enough for the changes.

I truly believe that even though we feel we know a lot we don't know much because this is just the beginning of the change from old to new in how automotive dealers run.
 
Dominion DMS
#322
Yago, I’ve seen this before. I was a GSM at a Dodge/Datsun (Nissan) store during the Carter administration. The buy rate, with good credit, was 13.9%. It was during the oil embargo and gas prices had more than doubled. Gas lines were common. You could only fill up every other day depending on the last digit of your license plate. The fed was printing money but they didn’t call it quantitative easing. As a result, the inflation rate was 13 to 14%. The government passed a wage and salary freeze. By law, you couldn’t give an employee more than a 3% raise. Unemployment was high but not this bad. People that owned big Cadillacs, Lincolns, and Oldsmobiles and other guzzlers couldn’t trade them. Used Car Managers wouldn’t even give you a bid. They had no expectation of selling one in 60 days.
As always, you had market leaders, average dealers, and below average dealers. Dealerships have always run on low net percentages. If you are one of those below average dealers, surviving, in a bad economy, isn’t going to be easy. I have never worked for one of those. I have never worked for a dealer that had low expectations. I can’t even plug into that type of mentality. It existed back then and it is thriving today as evidenced by these dealerships that haven’t embraced the internet after over 10 years.
It has always been about having good people, with good attitudes, and developing a culture of excellence. They understand that change is a part of business and they accept it and work through it.
 
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#323
I understand hard times. I always like a sign in my Dojo from a special forces unit that trained there: "Hard times don't last, hard men do".

But what I was trying to get is that these hard times have accelerated the change from the old way to do business/advertise/market/etc to the new way and left less time for dealers to adapt.

Technology is finally making a huge impact on those not implementing.
 
#324
yagoparamo said:
I understand hard times. I always like a sign in my Dojo from a special forces unit that trained there: "Hard times don't last, hard men do".

But what I was trying to get is that these hard times have accelerated the change from the old way to do business/advertise/market/etc to the new way and left less time for dealers to adapt.

Technology is finally making a huge impact on those not implementing.
Click to expand...

When I got to my base camp there was a sign "LRRPs go deeper and stay longer in the bush".

Dealers using electronic and print media, are going to spend more and see less results.
 
#325
yagoparamo said:
I understand hard times. I always like a sign in my Dojo from a special forces unit that trained there: "Hard times don't last, hard men do".

But what I was trying to get is that these hard times have accelerated the change from the old way to do business/advertise/market/etc to the new way and left less time for dealers to adapt.

Technology is finally making a huge impact on those not implementing.
Click to expand...
But not QR Codes - From ReadWriteWeb today: ReadWriteWeb Technology DeathWatch: QR Codes

The problems, according to the author, include competing technologies including Augmented Reality, NFC, RFID and even Apple's Siri, "Speaking the name of a company or person into your phone is a lot easier than typing in a URL. Plus, a voice-activated search can provide lots more information than a directed click of a link or tag."

Can this technology be saved?: "Probably not. It isn’t worth the effort."
 
#326
Ed Brooks said:
But not QR Codes - From ReadWriteWeb today: ReadWriteWeb Technology DeathWatch: QR Codes

The problems, according to the author, include competing technologies including Augmented Reality, NFC, RFID and even Apple's Siri, "Speaking the name of a company or person into your phone is a lot easier than typing in a URL. Plus, a voice-activated search can provide lots more information than a directed click of a link or tag."

Can this technology be saved?: "Probably not. It isn’t worth the effort."
Click to expand...

standards.png


Shazam has a case in the TV side, and text-for-info certainly works if you're after phone numbers, but I still fail to see anything that can get as widespread in print and physical objects (and as versatile for information delivered) as a QR code. My stance, anyway.
 
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Dominion DMS
#329
There are also plenty of pro-QRC websites (at least for now):

Yay Or Nay Of QR Code Marketing



  • Mobio Technologies - A study by Mobio Technologies Inc. confirms that the usage of QR code jumped upto 9,840% in the second quarter of the year 2011 when compared to the numbers last year in the same time period.
  • Gartner – The marketing research firm confirms the high-rise in the usage of QR codes in recent times.
  • comScore – The very famous comScore sent shivers down the Internet Marketing industry when they confirmed that around 14 million Americans scanned QR codes from their cell phones in the month June of 2011. That is huge when compared to the time period since when QR codes have been in America.

But when thinking about QRC I like this comment the most:

"remember: The content — not the delivery mechanism — is king."

In the case of the how we have promoted to use it, mainly to obtain a price by a customer in the field or to move directions to a dealer from a PC screen to a cell phone, "content is king" still applies.

Just because a technology is defunct with mass media doesn't mean it can't be very useful for small unique applications.
 
Dominion DMS
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