Tag: customer
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How I want to buy a car
Every five or so years, I shop for a new car. I hate car shopping. The haggling, the long trips to dealerships way outside of town, the hours and hours of waiting, punctuated by furtive whispers to my husband, “Don’t give in! Stick to our budget! But don’t tell them our budget!” and similar. But that’s toward the end of the process. There’s a lot of work leading up to it.
First I hit the Consumer Reports site to research cars. A subscription is just $5.95 a month, but it auto-renews so you have to remember to unsubscribe or it quietly chips away at your wallet forever.
I find the five safest vehicles according to my car type and year. When I say new car, I just mean it’s new to me. I like to benefit from someone else’s new-car depreciation, which is something like 25% the minute you drive off the lot.
Anyway, I get on several different car sites like CarsDirect.com and AutoTrader.com to look for my next set of wheels. First I have to pick make and model, then enter my ZIP Code, then there’s a long list of cars. If I want to, I can see the list from lowest price to highest. The trouble is, I want to compare five different models and several different years. I’ve got to select the same filters over and over for all five and then compare the info. continue reading »
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Customer power
What if you could reduce the cost of marketing while giving customers better access to what they really want? Consumer empowerment requires that companies give up some control over product access, promotions and price in exchange for increased consumer responsiveness. See this Q&A with professor Luc Wathieu, Harvard Business School.
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