ABM Q4 - Flipbook - Page 46
OPI N I O N
R E TA I L
Nobody wants
this relationship
→ Dan Hulse is chief strategy officer at St Luke’s
M
arketers bloody love a
relationship. We want
customers spending
more time with us,
opening things, clicking
things, and ultimately,
coming back more often.
I’m convinced there are
plenty of categories
where that is completely backwards.
Nobody wants a relationship with
their garage. I don’t want to see
content about brake pads appearing
on my Instagram. I’m not looking
to join a community of like-minded
MOT enthusiasts. I just need to know
someone competent can fix my car.
The £1,000 trust exercise
Garages are a strange category, because
the stakes can be high, while the average
customer’s knowledge is fairly hopeless.
I might be making a decision worth
£1,000 or more, and I’m relying heavily on
the person giving me the diagnosis.
A generation or two ago, basic
maintenance was something plenty
of owners could reasonably attempt
themselves. Modern cars are staggeringly
complicated. For most of us, they’re
basically a black box with cup holders.
That makes trust unusually powerful.
The traditional servicing experience
hasn’t always made earning that trust
easy. You hand over the keys, lose the
car for a chunk of the day, and wait to
discover how painful the bill is.
For plenty of people, losing a car is also
a serious disruption. It keeps everyday
life moving, and having it sitting in a
garage all day can be a proper pain.
That is why the shift towards more
digital, mobile and proactive servicing
is interesting. A garage can know what
you drive, when the MOT is coming up
and what work has already been done.
Increasingly, the service can come to
you as well. You carry on with your day.
Someone else deals with the boring bit.
46
AUTOMOTIVE BUSINESS
Q4 2026
Invisible service
A few years ago, my car needed its air
conditioning re-gassed. The dealership
was talking about roughly £200. I drove
to Halfords, parked up and someone
came out to the car and sorted it there
and then for about £45. The savings were
great. The convenience was priceless.
Car parts are full of numbers and
letters that mean absolutely nothing to
most normal people. Give someone your
registration, get pointed towards the
right one and have somebody help fit it.
Anxiety removed, and the jobs a good’un.
There is a very useful brand whitespace
in being the person who knows what
they’re doing when the customer freely
admits they don’t. If they trust you to use
that knowledge to help them, rather than
take advantage of their cluelessness,
that’s worth its weight in gold.
Broadband works in much the same
way. Nobody stays up at night craving
a more meaningful relationship with
their broadband provider. You just want
the Wi-Fi to work. One of my colleagues
lives out in the sticks. His neighbour
accidentally cut through their fibre cable
with a hedge trimmer, and it took around
two weeks to fix. His 18-year-old son
moved out until it got fixed. Apparently,
life with a book and the radio wasn’t
worth sticking around for.
Broadband sits quietly in the
background until it fails, at which point
family life enters DEFCON 1. Cars are
much the same. We depend on them
without particularly wanting to spend our
evenings thinking about how they work.
For categories like these, constant
interaction is an odd ambition. A
customer opening fewer emails, making
fewer phone calls and spending less time
worrying about the service is a sign that
things are going extremely well.
There are plenty of marketers who
would look at that customer and worry
about their engagement score. I’d leave
them alone. Their car works.
