If Not You, Then Who?

If Not You, Then Who?

Solomon Daniels, Editor-in-Chief

Our customers want something from us. Unfortunately, we’re not listening.

A table full of beer bottles. Raucous laughter. You’d think we were sailors on leave with the scene we were making.

Of course, I hadn’t had any of the beers, but that didn’t stop the rest of the editorial team of Mobile Electronics magazine, then owned by a publishing company in California, from imbibing and enjoying the break from writing, selling and publishing. We were attending the annual in-house competition that pitted all the company’s trade magazines against one another: nail salons versus police officers, rental fleets versus limos, car stereos versus buses.

Our magazine ended up with some pretty nice wins: sales percentage, some design honors, and my personal favorite, best editorial. But by time the awards ended, the school bus magazine came out on top as the overall winner … like it usually did.

As a professional, you look at what you could have done better, but you also want to understand the circumstances. We had a panel of judges not affiliated with any magazine or industry that we covered as a publishing company. And yet, school buses always seemed to finish in the top three.

Why? Because it’s a lot easier to relate to a school bus than an amplifier. Most of the topics covered by the bus magazine centered on safety: selecting responsible drivers, crash prevention, riding behavior, if buses should have seat belts, alarms that tell drivers a child was left on the bus.

Everyone can relate to kids, whether you have them or not. You don’t have to be an expert to connect emotionally to the topic, especially as it pertains to safety. So while the judges’ eyes glazed over with talk of 12 volts, fabrication and OEM integration, the idea of kids riding buses to school safely created mental movies in which their own kids, nieces or nephews played the starring role.

Simply put, safety is easy to market. That’s why just about every car commercial you see is selling vehicles based on safety features, not horsepower or 20-inch wheels. Semi-autonomous driving, automatic braking, lane departure warning, expanded camera views … these are the stories that carmakers are using to train customers on what a new vehicle represents. And guess what? It’s working.

In my KnowledgeFest Long Beach class on mastering public relations for retail, we talked about ultimately becoming the go-to resource for your local news outlets when they are doing stories on vehicle technology. Everyone in the class recognized that safety is the hottest topic surrounding vehicles today, yet when I asked how many retailers in the room (about 82 people) considered themselves experts in aftermarket safety technology, I got about five hands up … actually, make that four, because one of the hands up was mine.

You see the disconnect here? Customers readily relate to the concept of safety and easily identify with—and place value on—products and services that protect them, their children and other passengers. Yet, as service providers, we are ill-prepared to meet their desire to have a safer driving experience on the vehicles they already own. We don’t talk about adding cameras. We don’t trust the aftermarket versions of safety technology, such as collision alert, lane departure and blind spot sensors, because somebody said it sucked and we didn’t do our own due diligence. Or maybe we’re concerned about the liability if our safety solution does not provide ample warning.

And so we keep selling stereos. We put the camera displays in the rear of the showroom, unplugged. We bring up safety products only if the customer asks for them. And customers are left with just the “training” they received from all those car commercials: if they want the latest safety technology, they need to buy a new car. Some will do that, and along with their purchase, get a new stereo that’s “good enough” because it controls the air conditioner and works with their iPhone®. Ultimately, we lose either way. This cannot happen. It’s time for us to take the driver’s seat on aftermarket safety. Everything we do in our stores is about building trust, so that customers think of us first when they want new technology for their vehicle. How can we not be able to talk with them about high-value enhancements they hear about every time they watch the news?

We must be proactive in telling our customers about technology and devices they can add to their vehicles to make their drivers safer … with our trusted expertise. This means each of us needs to be confident in our industry’s products and our own capabilities. Make safety a priority in your stores. We’re at the point where ignoring it isn’t an option … it’s a disservice.