The Tesco Lesson- Learn it - before it eats your market

Spending a lot of time in the car market at the moment, we’re very aware of one of the big news stories for the sector. Tesco is moving into cars.

It’s a move that is worrying some in the motoring trade, and for good reason: Tesco is a big player - big enough to throw 300m pounds at cracking the US market without blinking. The fear is that it throws similar sums at the UK car market, allowing it to undercut and out-market established players.

But Tesco is more than just a big player with deep pockets. It is a sophisticated organisation that has led the way in the use of customer data to drive better business. There are lessons that the motoring trade can learn from this aspect of Tesco’s success that will help them compete when the blue and white 800lb gorilla joins the market.

Tesco collects enormous quantities of data from its clubcard programme: data that show what individual customers like, but also what different types of customer want to buy. Given that cars aren’t like food - something you buy every week (at least for most people) - it’s hard to see how car dealers can capture this sort of data. Or is it?

90% of people start their car shopping online, browsing around the aggregator sites and looking at individual dealerships to find the right vehicle and the right deal. In doing so they give away huge amounts of information about their intentions with regards to the product they want and how they want to pay for it.

Capturing and understanding this information can provide a huge amount of understanding about the prospect, allowing car dealers to make informed decisions and optimise their approach to customers just like Tesco. Understand the customer better and you can tailor your service, your proposition and your pitch to better meet their needs.

If you’d like to be one step ahead when Tesco arrives in the market, give us a call today.

Photo used with thanks to Peter Kaminski.