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Uncle Joe's Makeover Diary 2.0

joe.pistell

Uncle Joe
Apr 7, 2009
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@Alex Snyder how do you feel about the Capital One button cannibalizing leads from your FRIKINTech thingy? ;)

COMMUNISTS!​

:lmao:Joe

@Ryan Everson, I think Capital One is hiding from its competition and using boots on the street + this product to enable it. As a business practice, it is smart on their part, but it is a terrible consumer experience. It is anti-transparency all because they don't want to publish rates. Just another fancy lead form that bleeds dealership website visitors away from the dealership. Too many dealers have fallen for this without regarding the customer experience.

I think dealers should choose an obvious online path for the customer that does not conflict with what they will experience in the showroom. FRIKINtech goes through a lot of effort to make sure payments a customer sees are repeatable by sales managers, regardless of who the lender is (we have access to over 1,400 lenders, by the way).

When it comes to Capital One, I don't lose any sleep over them. Where FRIKINtech is headed is a vastly different direction than competing over real estate on a dealer's website. Our website component is a bonus for dealers on top of all the ways we can engage their shoppers now! Things have changed in the last two years ;)
 

✨ AI Highlights

Joe Pistell, a well-known automotive digital marketing figure who recently departed Cars.com, returns to DealerRefresh to share experiments and strategy under a sequel to his original 'Makeover Diary' thread. He explores vehicle merchandising innovations — including AI-generated detailer imagery, feature taxonomy complexity across build sheets, and Carvana's lead in VDP merchandising — while lamenting the fragmented state of traditional dealer web vendors. A key insight is that Carvana's tight feedback loop between operations and engineering lets them iterate rapidly on sales productivity metrics, leaving traditional vendors still chasing basic lead generation.

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