Looking Outside Automotive - Some Cool Ideas from Other Industries

Automotive is traditionally pretty insular – we look only at our nearest and dearest competitors, with maybe a token glance at what manufacturers are doing. When we take design briefs from dealer clients, they often reference the very biggest players outside the industry (think Amazon, or Apple) but rarely take inspiration from anywhere else. And we think dealers deserve to have unique websites.

We think the best ideas come when you’re absorbing as much as you can from around the web – and so today we’re curating a collecting of jazzy bits and excellent execution, to get you thinking about whether the motor trade can do anything similar (or, dare we say it, better!).

How do you disrupt the entire Estate Agency marketplace? Through a combination of ease and transparency.

The Purple Bricks website isn’t revelatory, but it does what it needs to do very well indeed. It builds transparency into everything – from embedded reviews and social proof, through to clear pricing, explanations and information for customers.

It also puts the effort into making everything easy to use. It deliberately doesn’t shy away from social conventions, instead understanding that by ensuring customers find everything really straightforward and intuitive to use they will be more likely to convert. There is definitely something to learn from here!

Parallax sites (that is, sites that are all on one scrollable page) may not be completely appropriate for the motor trade (with all of its many business areas), but that doesn’t mean we can’t be inspired by them.

We loved this site for its clever animations, adding delight as you move down the page and continually re-engaging you. Combine that with excellent imagery and you’ve got something that stands out, and makes you experience the luxury of the product at hand.

Trust Google to do something unexpected. The “Best Things for Everything” site professes to feature all of the highest ranked products, and it does so with an innovative and highly engaging layout. Use your mouse to click and drag around, before clicking into individual products.

To be honest, after the first page it’s a pretty simple concept, but that unusual homepage really stands out and the embedded reviews (and deep understanding of the importance of social proof) make it well worth mentioning.

It’s a beautiful site on the whole, but we particularly wanted to draw attention to how AirBnB have combined their search into the top navigation area of the page. They’ve clearly identified the key action, and are doing everything they can to ensure that customers do exactly what they want them to.

If you’ve got new and used cars available to search on your site, could your website do a similar thing? Dare you drop the banners for more journey-focused content?

If you know that your customers have a number of different journeys, what do you do? You make the whole homepage about getting them into the right place, that’s what. SuperYachtsMonaco manage to combine their luxury product with a really simple journey splitter, thanks to stunning imagery overlaid with two key steps – “I want to buy a yacht”, or “I want to charter a yacht”.

This sort of simplicity and focus gets people to the most relevant place as fast as possible, helping them to convert – and could have a direct equivalent for car dealers where usually there is a clear path – new, used, or aftersales.

Fresh eyes and fresh industries are what stop automotive from growing stale – and we think it’s vital to look to the future and always turn our gazes’ outwards. Thankfully, as an agency producing uniquely branded sites, we can do almost anything, all whilst making the most of our appropriately automotive-focused technology.

It really is the best of both worlds!