"We've reduced to very little incentive-type advertising," he said. "It's much more, why do business with us? Why does it feel good to do business with us? It's because of these processes and these things that we've put in place."
Mountsier, 34, said he is so passionate about bringing marketing in-house that he is leaving the dealership group at the end of August to start a training and consulting company that will work with dealerships on recruiting, hiring and training marketing employees, starting in September.
Mountsier spoke with Staff Reporter Lindsay VanHulle about in-house marketing, the response to Vroom's commercial and digital retailing. Here are edited excerpts.
On making the switch to in-house marketing
We trust our most precious thing, which is our brand and our vision and the way we make people feel, to agencies all the time.
So why wouldn't we build something in-house that can care for that and carry that, strategize around that, manage a people strategy around that and internally and externally communicate that in a way that's unique to us?
You probably can't tie one car sale to one person in that team like you can a salesperson. And it's probably going to take time to see the large-scale impact. In a business that's typically month-to-month, it's not the easiest thing to grab.
But the long-term benefits are large-scale savings, increased brand awareness and customer loyalty.
On Nelson's response to the Vroom Super Bowl ad
Everybody was on all the social media platforms saying, "We need to do something about this. We're not going to take this. It's not like that." So on a Tuesday morning, myself and our creative digital marketing specialist were sitting together, and we said, "You know what? We should maybe, actually, do something about this."
We wrote a script, put together storyboards on a Wednesday morning. We shot it. By Wednesday afternoon, we had it pushed out. It was about 48 hours from ideation to implementation.
From a paid ad perspective, we ran it for about 60 days. The lift was really good from it as far as website conversion. We didn't want to run it too long because we didn't want to draw too much attention to what was being said. But if a challenging commercial gets dropped at the Super Bowl, there were enough eyes that we knew that we would communicate to the right people in the right time.
On the return from an in-house marketing team
You're not going to get 10 extra cars next month because you hired that person this month. You might, but most likely it's going to look like over the next 18 months, two years, five years, we're going to see a massive difference in the way our strategy is aligned with our goals.
Did we sell more cars? Do we write more customer tickets? Did we increase retention? And did we increase market share?
If those things happen over time, and the major change is that we've done a better job at our marketing strategy, then we're probably doing something right.
