"When business gets tough, so many people want to cut the budget. We never cut our budget. Even though sales are down, we stay right in there because we know we're going to be gaining market share. We know that, because we always have," says Jim Lamparter, eighteen-year president of the Ontario Auto Center. A veteran of thirty-four years in the automotive industry, Lamparter recognizes the importance of consistency and persistency in bringing in customers with electronic media. For the past twelve years he's been hammering home the auto center's theme of "the one-place stop to shop" and the same copy points - hundreds of models, thousands of vehicles, lowest prices, largest selection. "We have a Memorial Day Sale, Anniversary Sales, Summer Savings Sale, we have a Labor Day Sale - each month has a different title but we are basically hammering the same message home over and over again. We've turned the Freeway Electronic sign into a personality, and we create an on-going story about him. That helps keeps people interested and makes them remember us." And, it works. "When we started in the summer of 1988," he says, "this place was a vineyard. I was elected president the following year and we have gone from non-existent to become the second largest auto center in Southern California, selling forty thousand new and used vehicles every year." Lamparter learned much of his art from Cerritos Auto Mall, which he studied as a partner in a multi-dealer group. "I learned a long time ago if you want to be successful, look at who's successful and copy ‘em. So, I said, early on, we should just concentrate on electronic media. Let the individual dealer be in the newspaper and we'll focus on radio and cable TV. Broadcast TV is very expensive and, even though we're in L.A., we're in a different market. It's really a market of its own out here in the Inland Empire, so I stay with our local radio and cable." "A lot of people say they're going to try radio not realizing that it's not something that works in less than sixty days. It takes months to get established. I tell them, "don't expect much of a change in less than six months. And, if you cut your budget for two or three months and your sales don't go down, you feel that maybe you didn't need to spend that money. But, then sales do start down and you begin spending money again and sales don't come back. It takes months to build it back up again. I learned that more than twenty years ago." Lamparter learned something else about radio advertising early on - its memory power. "We had Moon Datsun, which later became Moon Nissan, when we moved it from Lakewood to Cerritos Auto Square. We had Moon Datsun and Sun Datsun in Whittier. We were playing the Doris Day hit, ‘Sun in the Morning and the Moon at Night' and we got called on it. We were told, ‘You better not use that or we're going to sue you.' So, we gave it up after only five or six months. Two years later, we were sourcing people, ‘Do you hear our commercial?' They said, ‘Oh yes, the sun in the morning and the moon at night. We hear it on the radio.' It hadn't been on the radio in two years and they still remembered that! That told me that if you concentrate your buy with a lot of frequency in one or two weeks, you can be on heavy and then be off and come back heavy and people will think you're on all the time." "We spread our budget about fifty-fifty between radio and cable TV," he continues. "The cable spot is 30-seconds and features the same creative as radio, telling the latest story about the "humanized" giant freeway sign that we consistently tie in with each campaign. The radio supports the cable and the cable supports the radio. Listeners pick up the message in their car and then they get home and turn on the TV and they see it." Lamparter runs the auto center spot each month, saturating nine English-speaking and five Spanish-speaking radio stations. He says, "We also get the benefit of being on the Internet, getting more and more hits every day. And, we have hot links from our radio station sites as well. Also, ‘streaming' our commercials on most of the radio stations." "The automobile industry throughout the country and in Southern California is in kind of a recession," he concludes. "It's particularly difficult out here right now. One reason is because we have $3+ gasoline. We have a commuter population and its largely blue collar, so the percentage of their take-home pay going for gasoline is huge. I think sub-prime loans in our market also have a negative effect." "The objective we have in advertising is to maintain ‘top of the mind awareness'. We know the majority of the people who see or hear our commercials are not in the market for a car, and regardless of how good it is, they're not coming in. With whatever percentage of the market that is in the market for a car, it's pretty easy to defer that decision for three or four or five months. But we know that if we stay where we are that when they are in the market for a car, they'll think of us first. And, I know that, because of our consistency in advertising, we're going to be gaining market share. Even though sales are down, we're going to be gaining market share from our competition because we always have." "The best advice I can give to an advertiser is just to stay with it. Get in, commit yourself to it and stay with it."
Photo credit: Mark R. Root Productions
July 2007
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