Kristin Colier

You’ve all heard that good news travels fast and that bad news travels faster – or in marketing circles, one negative experience gets ten times more word-of-mouth than one positive one.

Here, I’d like to illustrate the impact of one negative experience, magnified over time…

I had the ‘pleasure’ of helping my mother shop for a new car this weekend. This is pretty big-ticket item and I bet the car industry would like to know what went through Mom’s head for the decision making process.
Mom had several simple criterion. Budget: around $15K, more leg room in the backseat than her current car and that it NOT be purchased from a Curry Auto dealership.

About 25 years ago, my mother was in the market for a car – after looking around, and considering several at the Curry dealer, the salesman said to her: “I know you probably want to go home and discuss it with your husband first.”

DOH! Not the right thing to say to a liberated, well-educated, recently-divorced woman. It pissed her off, she never went back and she bought her car elsewhere.

Fast forward to this past weekend…it appears Curry has taken over just about every car dealership in the Yorktown, Peekskill and Cortland area.

“Why, again, do we need to buy a car three towns over?” I asked her.

She said: Once when I was at the Curry dealer shopping for a car, the salesman said: “Hey, Little Lady, why don’t you come back when you’ve got your man with you and we’ll talk.”

When she tells this story, you hear the smarmy voice, smell the hair grease and imagine the too-tight plaid jacket. This cracked me up. Not only had she been re-telling this story for years until it evolved into something out of a movie (I’m picturing Danny DeVito here.) The single incident had played over in her head so many times that it seemed like it was Curry’s ongoing policy hire slimy, sexist jerks. Why would anyone want to buy a car there?

I suspect that Curry’s (real or imagined) misogynistic, old-school, good-ol’-boy sales force has since retired and been replaced with more progressive thinkers. Unbeknown to them, however, they are competing with stereotypes or misconceptions they probably didn’t even know existed among sixty-something year-old women that still have a bad taste in their mouth from years before. How much business do they lose? I don’t know, but as empty as the dealerships have been lately, every bit counts.

For most people, parting with $15,000 needs to satisfy an emotional component, not just a logical one… so we drove to another car dealership several towns over and bought Mom’s new car there.

Our marketing lesson of the day?

Well, you tell me…

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