Economic slumps can be found, quite often, in the details.
Don Cape has seen it firsthand in the behavior of his customers at Quick Lane Tire & Auto Centers.
Cape is national manager of Quick Lane, the $450 million car service brand of Ford Motor Co. with both dealer-based and off-site locations. During the economic slide of the past two years, Cape has seen how little decisions by customers can have a big impact on a business.
“One of the challenges over the past two years has really been getting customer traffic into the stores,” he says. “Customers that normally come in three times a year for service have been scaling back to once or twice a year.”
The routine auto maintenance that Quick Lane provides has become less of a necessity to customers looking to save a few bucks. Car owners who used to change their oil every 3,000 miles are now trying to stretch the interval to 5,000 miles and beyond. It’s less healthy for the car, but healthier for the purposes of balancing a household budget.
But Cape and the leadership team at Quick Lane couldn’t simply accept the situation as a negative side effect of the economy. They still needed to drive business. They still needed to open new locations and pull new customers into the existing stores.
Cape and his team needed to identify Quick Lane’s niche in the auto service market, and then put every location in a position to capitalize on that niche. The management team assessed the situation and recognized that if Quick Lane was going to continue growing, it needed to emphasize convenience and stay local.
With that in mind, Quick Lane fashioned a marketing philosophy called “own your own backyard.”
“In this service business, it’s really key that you focus on the consumers in a 10- to 15-minute radius from each location,” Cape says. “That is the sweet spot. We suggested a two- to three-mile radius around each location,and market to those people specifically. It was a bit different, because many times in the past, we had found that we were reaching out too far from each location, maybe spending money in a way that didn’t get maximum return for each location.”
To gain the best possible traction on a narrowly defined local level, Quick Lane’s management needed to let location operators make their own marketing decisions. Corporate management could provide a marketing template, but location managers were in charge of marketing to their own area.
It’s an approach that requires corporate management to take a backseat and do a lot of listening.
