Why not display specific car features, like Sunroof, LED (Xenon) lights, leather, miles etc, instead of the ego driven thing
(also that ego driven thing (stars) obscures the wheel)
Hello everyone! My name is Mike Benavides and I am contributing to DR for the first time. After more that 20 years in this industry creating and syndicating automotive data and software, I recently joined Xcite -- who's primary business is the physical and digital merchandising of vehicles. Here are my thoughts on the various topics discussed in this thread:
*Superimposing vehicles: I am not a fan of this practice for several reasons, including the lack of authenticity (in the very first photo, no less) and lack of continuity with the rest of your photo set. If you have a great facility and the space to shoot your vehicles there, go for it. Otherwise, dedicate a location for this activity (ideally in a consistent, controlled environment like a booth, scenic area, or space flanked with professional signage). If that isn't possible, backgrounds can be blurred and branded wrappers can be added.
*Branded wrappers: I am surprised by the "ego" comments. I believe the photo wrappers are an ideal tool to showcase and reinforce your dealership's visual identity, help your vehicles stand-out on a third-party site, highlight your physical and digital addresses, as well as display a trackable phone number for customers to respond directly.
*Features & options merchandising: First and foremost, this is about conveying value and defending price. There is a perfect storm of forces that make it very difficult to identify vehicles to the trim/style level, plus their installed options, packages and colors -- namely poor VIN decode capabilities, lack of OEM data & content support, disparate import operations, owner modifications and an aftermarket industry that is completely off the grid.
Identifying key features and options is essential to:
(1) determining the accurate value of a vehicle. Even used cars can vary by tens of thousands of dollars, depending on installed packages and options. This is especially difficult for incoming trade-ins that are outside your franchise brand. This affects nearly every transactional stakeholder in our industry -- retailers, wholesalers, auctions, lenders, insurers, etc.
(2) helping shoppers search/find vehicles that meet their needs (for many reasons, most third-party sites have abandoned feature-based searches), and
(3) allowing shoppers to quickly and easily identify these features and quantify their added value. Some third parties have done an excellent job of highlighting key features with intuitive icons and simple descriptions. Fortunately, the next generation of visual media will directly incorporate this icons and descriptions into photos, videos and 360 spins. Think of that great (prior) post on this thread with all of those post-it notes, but more visually appealing and (most importantly)
automated.
My company has the unique ability to identify original installed options and syndicate the underlying codes and descriptions for all non-exotic brands. So far we have created some digital assets that our clients use to differentiate themselves, including a "photo" (inserted into the VDP photo set) which lists the key installed packages and their original MSRP values, plus a Digital Window Sticker which incorporates this data in a more conventional VDP visual format.
*VDP format: While it would be great to move away from layouts that combine photo sets, engagement boxes and an unreadable blob of features and specs, that's what we've got for the foreseeable future. Eventually, I'd like VDPs to be dominated by a more interactive experience. The latest 360-spins show the most promise towards that kind of engaging shopping experience that is content-rich and increasingly personalized.
Has anyone experimented with these 360-spin options?
