Selling advice

Kicking the wheels – Selling cars to women

 

By
04 Sep 2019

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Selling cars to women is naturally a little different to sealing the deal with men. Figures from CBS news says that one in five men in the will go out on their car search knowing exactly what they want. They prioritise things like transmission type and engine size.  Men also tend to look for European luxury like BMW or Jaguar and enjoy very high spec technology. They will take on average about sixty-three days to choose their next wheels. How about the girls? 

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Women too will have pretty set ideas of what they want in their new car but the difference is, that a surprising thirty eight per cent say they do not feel very confident that they are making the right choice.  A woman will take longer to decide too, on average seventy-five days. The CBS study suggests that Women are more cautious when making a car purchase and that is true on both sides of the Atlantic with women tending to prefer the Asian ranges, and prioritising affordability, reliability, durability and a good safety record.

Pricing

Interestingly the study also reveals that if you are confident and determined to buy a specific car, you might actually get it for a better price! That is because the car dealers can tell when a buyer is suffering a crisis of confidence and will not be above using that uncertainty, trying to leverage the unease when negotiating a price. On average, it seems, men can expect to get a better price on their new wheels than women.

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Head Honcho of Citroen, Linda Jackson

In 2017, the chief executive of the French giant Citroen, Linda Jackson who is British and a grandmother says that she makes regular visits to showrooms to check out the competition. In an interview, she told the Mail’s Ray Massey. ‘Sometimes you go into a showroom with your husband and they just turn to your male partner and say: How would you like to spend your money? This is what we need to change.” After six years at the helm of Citroen, Linda’s taken on a new role in brand differentiation for the company.

Change your tune guys!

And the Citroen boss is definitely on to something when she says that car salesmen need to have another look at how they deal with their lady customers.  In the 21st century saying something to a woman like ‘Maybe you should bring your partner with you later to see the car’ are not going to wash with today’s lady drivers.  With almost an equal amount of male and female drivers on UK roads, we may have different tastes in cars but we both know that we want good value and good service. Acknowledge this and selling cars to women could get a whole lot easier![/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Insurance gains

On the plus side the men don’t have it all their own way with women typically paying less for insurance in their early motoring career. That is because they statistically are safer drivers, according to a new report that was compiled by the price comparison site Confused.com. The website said that men paid, on average, £793 per year compared to £701 paid by women and that is a difference of around 13%. In December 2012 an EU directive banned insurers from using gender as a criteria for setting insurance premiums, so the statistics seem to indicate that women are in a group that attracts lower premiums by virtue of the fact that they are safer drivers. By middle age, however, this gap closes and insurance premiums equalise. 

Millennial Magic

 Of course the millennial’s, as always, deserve a mention.  Women in this group are just as confident as their male counterparts when buying wheels, and those guys believe that their fellow women millennials are sharper negotiators than they are, approaching the purchase more logically, and sometimes with more willingness to haggle.  

Buying a car has never been an easy thing with the large amounts of money involved, and it is clear that both genders have their strengths and weaknesses in the rarefied atmosphere of the car showroom.  But what is clear is that lady drivers will no longer put up with being fobbed off and overlooked when they are in the market for a car. With as many female as male drivers now on British roads, car sellers would do well to keep that in mind and sharpen up their sales pitches when they are selling to the ladies of the land. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]