Car Dealers Urged to Market to 'Magical' Brain

Erik Radle isn’t a psychologist, but rather an adman who delves into how the human brain works and responds.

“The brain is a magical thing,” says the CEO of Dallas-based Miller Ad Agency. “It is constantly remapping itself.”

Accordingly, psychology plays a big role in, for example, how car dealers convey information by keeping it simple and deliver a positive customer experience by reinforcing the wisdom of a purchase decision. He calls the latter “cognitive-bias impact.”

The keeping-it-simple part includes maintaining a website that doesn’t put Internet users into sensory overload.

“Don’t put 10 pounds of sugar in a five pound bag,” Radle says at a recent DrivingSales Executive Summit conference. “People don’t multitask well. If they are doing six things, they’ll do one well and five poorly. Don’t force them to multi-task on a website.”

He cites Amazon’s as exemplary. That’s because it doesn’t toss a ton of information at users. “They hide information behind the clicks. It avoids TMI.”

Radle’s advice to dealers: “See what you are doing on your website that could prevent someone from visiting your dealership.”

How a price is posted can influence people’s perceived value, he says. For example, saying a vehicle is $39,999 marked down $10,000 to $29,999 is more effective than just saying it is $29,999.

“Our brain assigns value based on the first price it sees, a bias called ‘anchoring’ such that a car that was $39,999 and reduced visibly to $29,999 has more value than a car simply priced at the reduced $29,999 without showing the discount,” he tells WardsAuto. 

People buy wine the same way, he adds as they are “look looking for a large discount and a primary higher anchored value.”

Cerebral selling extends to the choice of who appears in TV ads. Radle generally prefers dealers themselves fill that role.

But regardless of who does it, “the talent must look like people you are trying to serve,” he says. “In Dallas, I’m forced to watch a commercial of a dealer wearing loud clothes and flashing a Rolex watch. “He’s trying to prove he doesn’t look like his customers.”

Bad idea. So are ads that start out with dealers introducing themselves. That’s boring, and “you’ve wasted the opening seconds on yourself,” Radle says.

From 2005 to 2007, Radle was a managing partner at the Hiley Auto Group in Arlington, TX. He’s held sales and marketing posts for Mazda and Subaru.

For the former DaimlerChrysler, he trained 250 field managers on dealership operations.

Videos and visuals are an integral part of human life, as evidence by the proliferation of jumbo video screens at sporting events and concerts and the wild popularity of social-media websites such as YouTube.

Radle tells what’s fundamentally behind all that. “The human brain is really good at processing images.”

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