Think about this…
- Car sales decline in the month of December,
- Consumers focused on Black Friday, is for big box stores and shopping malls, but not Franchise Car Dealers.

OEM’s collectively, really needs to consider creating Rainbow Saturday as it will help consumers, dealers, third party vendors, and themselves, in moving the economy forward, for years to come.

How ?
Here let me elaborate some of my thoughts, OEM’s could work out some serious incentives for their franchised dealers, to offer consumers in late November or early December during a nationwide (or global) event called Rainbow Saturday.

When the event takes place, A percentage of these Rainbow Saturday buyers will want dealers to lay away (hold) these vehicles and pick them up a day or two before Christmas as a special surprise for a family, family member, or love one. That’s ok and good, the deals done and a little storage will not hurt a dealership. But when this happens a dealership could offer a Santa home delivery to add the much needed buyers emotional experience, that keeps them coming back. The Santa experience could works something like this, a dealership hires a Santa for Christmas vehicle deliveries, whereby the sales consultant follows Santa to customers driveway for delivery, then… has some fun with the customer, by taking pictures with the surprise new car owner(s), and Santa beside the car. Then when Santa and sales consultant return to the dealership, the pictures can be uploaded on to the new owner fb page (with permission of course), dealerships fb page and website, OEM’s website and more. This would be a memorable experience for any new car owner and one that would have them favor your dealership so much so, they would actually tell others.

This event would be a great way for OEM’s to help Franchised Dealers clear the lot of their “new year old inventory” and some brand new inventory. Franchised Dealers, would want to positioned themselves prior to the event to offer buyers incentives for their trade-ins over and beyond the trade-in value to gain repeat, referral and service center business. Here's how a dealer might want to do this, when they negotiate the trade-in during the Rainbow Saturday event they provide the buyer a service incentive as part of the event, this adds to the buyers trade in value and experience. The service incentive provided for the Rainbow Saturday event could work this way for example, a trade-in value of XX, plus a service incentive of X to be used on any vehicle within the buyers household at the dealerships service center(s). For a buyers to take advantage of the service incentive, provided during the Rainbow Saturday event, all the buyers has to do is provide the dealer with the family member names, contact and vehicles information for whom they will allow to use the service incentive, as their brand spanking new vehicle should not have any immediate need for the service incentive. Now, think about the relationship building Rainbow Saturday would do for a dealer, not only will a dealer gain a new car sale, the dealer will gain a family in their service center allowing the dealer to earn the customers trust for all their future vehicle needs. Additionally during the Rainbow Saturday event, dealers would receive the much needed benefit of being supplied some nice used vehicles for stocking into their used inventory. Yes ! some trade-in will not work on a particular dealer lot, but that’s no problem, dealers can easily post them on CarrierRates to receive competitive auto shipping bids from carriers to have them shipped to auction for wholesale.

The Rainbow Saturday event would benefit OEMs’, franchised dealers, consumers, third party vendors, and even independent dealers as they would have access to purchase a percentage of those used trade-in from franchised dealers. This event shows great signs of having consumers drive those new cars right off the lot.

Not only, will a dealers have stronger sells in December, they will have an increase in fresh used inventory, increase in their service department revenues and customer base.

The theme, could look something like this at the dealership, A huge Rainbow Saturday display done up in a Christmas kind of way, that send off the message of peace and goodwill for all. It could even make the perfect holiday decoration.

Isn’t -- RAINBOW SATURDAY -- an exhilarating thought for OEMs’, Franchised Dealers’, Third Party vendors to help consumers, resulting in simulating kindness and the economy?

It’s Fun ! It’s Doable ! It’s Scalable !

I would thoroughly enjoy hearing from all of you, your thoughts…

By: John Skelton
CarrierRates founder
Originally posted on: http://carrierrates.blogspot.com/