General Motors Wants Dealerships To Update Their Image

General Motors is revamping dealerships for its Buick, Chevrolet and GMC brands for the first time in nearly two decades. The new program is designed to move the locations away from the traditional dealership experience to yield an open design concept and less high-pressure sales tactics.

Showrooms will incorporate an abundance of glass walls and the now-familiar blue archway featuring the relevant marquee. According to Automotive News, corporate leadership believes this will create a more welcoming environment for customers with the added benefit of making the models stored inside visible from outside of the building.

Inside, it sounds like dealers will be abandoning desks so they can pivot to more open floorplans with high tables and lounge chairs. That way you can feel like you’re making the second largest purchase of your life inside of a fast-casual restaurant. Obviously, GM doesn’t see it that way. It simply wants to put customers into a more relaxed state of mind and believes the environment will assist in that endeavor.

Having already seen higher-end brands attempt to curate a lounge-like atmosphere at sales centers, it looks as though GM’s mainstay brands are trying to follow suit. Almost all of the aesthetic changes seem to be moving toward making potential buyers seem warm and cozy while they talk business. General Motors probably figures adding some comfy chairs, a dash of wood, inviting lighting, and glass windows that let in some extra daylight will keep people in a relaxed mindset. Reports have indicated that some locations may even get cafes.

We certainly won’t be bashing the dealerships for making an effort, especially if it is to truly coincide with lower-pressure sales tactics. But the execution needs to be right. Poor efforts will result in showrooms resembling the Panera Bread you recently stopped going to, whereas a stronger effort will make dealer interiors resemble the newer Panera Bread you’ve recently replaced it with.

As this is General Motors, screens are likely to feature heavily. The automaker would like showrooms to feature informative displays in both showrooms and service centers. Monitors will undoubtedly play tranquil marketing materials. But it also sounds like there will be some interactive displays to help with the sales process.

This may pair with preexisting efforts to digitize a dealership’s entire inventory via something like eVN Autograph. Loads of dealerships (including those slinging GM products) already lean on these services to show off their stock online. While the computer-generated images used aren’t technically real photographs, they do represent vehicles in a manner that includes things like trim, features, color, wheel options and more. They also prevent the dealership from having to pay someone to take photos of vehicles as they come in.

Customers could theoretically use a kiosk (or their phone) to browse the virtual dealer inventory while they wait on a sales associate. Once the paperwork is finalized, the car will then be brought around to new dedicated delivery areas — which are supposed to streamline the overall process.

General Motors has been embracing the concept of digital dealerships for quite some time and has been pushing the concept of online sales. The assumption here is that the automaker will save itself some money while boosting sales volume. While the automaker has also insisted that dealerships will remain an important part of the plan, it’s not abundantly clear how this scheme will help physical retailers in the long run. If anything, it seems like it’ll gradually make them less important until they’re just a place to pick up your vehicle or have it serviced.

All told, the latest changes feel rather familiar to prior initiatives where GM encouraged dealers to update their storefronts. In the 2010s, the automaker was likewise asking that showrooms include a specific type and shade of tile flooring, more wood furniture, higher-end lounge chairs, and a surplus of glass walls that included the blue archway.

At the time, those inclusions were deemed highly specific by many due to the fact that they came with specific requirements about what company you could source the materials from. The cost of the work was another factor. GM specified that the renovations were wholly voluntary at the time and was willing to offer stores anywhere from $50,000 to $1.5 million in incentives to participating dealers — depending on their size.

It sounds like General Motors is treating this sort of like the second wave with more digitization. Dealers that failed to participate in the previous round of updates (or simply couldn’t afford it) are being asked to have another go. Meanwhile, stores that made the updates fifteen years ago may still be in need of a refresh and some added tech inclusions.

[Image: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock; Franchesko Mirroni/Shutterstock]

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