GMAP Consulting, which supplies market intelligence and predictive modelling to the automotive industry, has appointed Mark Whitton as automotive business development director to improve the used car intelligence available to dealerships.
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“Used car sales are the most profitable for any dealership, yet the quality of market information available to dealers would be unacceptable in virtually every other retail sector”, said GMAP principal consultant Martin Clarke. “The information they do get is mostly based on manufacturers’ territory definitions, which don’t reflect where all of their sales are really coming from”.
“There is a clear opportunity to help used car dealers really understand their local markets and to tune their stock, sales and marketing activities appropriately,” said Whitton.
Ten years ago, dealers sold 0.8 used cars to each new car. Now they sell three used cars per new car. A recent report said 6.6 million used cars were sold in the UK, at a value of £28.1 billion, figures similar to Germany, where 6.8 million used cars were sold last year.
Whitton has previously worked with an unnamed car manufacturer to design a used car programme, suitable for the post-block exemption world, that allows it to set sales objectives on the basis of carefully defined local markets. By creating a “distance decay model”, they were able to determine the influence of each dealership from which sales could be anticipated.
