Thursday, January 15, 2009

How I used my mobile phone to buy my new car

I just bought a new car. I also happen to work for Gumiyo, and some of our Gumiyo-powered partners’ provide mobile marketing solutions for their car dealer customers. As one who’s stood on a soapbox evangelizing the mobile channel for the retail automotive space, I figured this would be a fantastic opportunity to put my theoretical punditry to the test and actually use my mobile phone to buy a car.

Here’s what I did: After determining that I wanted a certified pre-owned or new vehicle, I took time during the week to visit all the local dealer Web sites in which I was interested. Living in Los Angeles, the largest retail automotive market in the country, meant that I had a lot of choices.

I went to all these dealership Web sites to scan availability of the models and trim that interested me. Some of those dealers had Web-2-Mobile widgets (part of the Gumiyo platform) that let me send vehicles from a Web page to my phone where I could save them for later reference. I later discovered just how handy this was.

Now, some dealers didn’t have that widget on their sites so I went to a third party lead provider where they have a similar widget. Here’s the difference: The dealers who had their own widget were able to track my activity and source me as an organic lead, not an expensive 3rd party lead. Plus, the message I received back from the dealers’ Web-2-Mobile widgets were dealer-branded and not branded with the third party’s brand. Big difference.

I also checked the newspaper knowing that some of the local dealers had placed mobile calls-to-action in their ads. In fact, one of those dealers was using the model name of a car I liked as a keyword. I knew that these dealer Go Codesâ„¢ would come in handy when I needed to access their content from the road.

By Saturday morning I’d sent about 15 individual vehicle listings to my phone from about 6 different dealers, and I was now in an obsessive quest to buy a car. I was the epitome of a down-funnel car buyer with money burning a hole in my pocket.

I was gone for seven hours that Saturday and all I had was my mobile phone. I must have gone back and forth between my text message “bookmarks” and the dealer’s mobile Web sites 40 or 50 times while on the lot or on my way to the next dealer. I was whipping my phone out to show the sales reps what I was interested in, I was using it to look up phone numbers and directions, and I was doing additional searches for similar vehicles. I also accessed 5 CARFAX reports while I was out there.

In fact, I found one vehicle on the dealer’s mobile site that I missed in the previous day’s Web searches.  This was the sole reason I came back to his lot. The sole reason! Remember, I was out and about and not going back to the house to check the Web. I even started paperwork on that car and if that dealer would have just cut the price a bit more we would have had a deal.

Now, the big question is, “Did I buy a car as a result of using mobile?” The answer is “yes.” One of the vehicles I sent to my phone from a dealer’s Web site had actually been sold by the time I visited the lot. I clicked that mobile listing to call the dealer, he said he could find me what I wanted, and we talked about price. We also texted each other quite a bit in order to keep me updated on his progress.

I bought my car on January 10th and it all started because that dealer made his store and his inventory easily available to me while I was on-the-go.

I love my new car, too.

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