TrueCar Launches New Way Of Doing Business; Will This Change Work Wonders?

TrueCar hopes to turn over a new Leaf…and Model 3…and Odyssey…and Camry. And it is hoping consumers will respond to its latest effort to make a radical change to its method of operation. Today the Santa Monica, Calif.-based third-party auto shopping facilitator is tossing out its old logo, old website and old way of doing business and is substituting a completely new experience that its executives expect will help it connect with more Millennial and female buyers…and more car-buyers in general.

Gone is TrueCar’s narrow emphasis on the transaction price, a factor that seems to be growing less important in the age of convenience. In its place is a more broad-based effort to help individual car buyers connect with a vehicle that will make them happy. Instead of concentrating on the let’s-make-a-deal portion of the vehicle-acquisition process the newest TrueCar iteration aims to aid the car buyer every step of the way.

“I think consumers actually have more selection than they’ve ever had, and I think they have more quality choices than they’ve ever had,” Mike Darrow, interim CEO and president of TrueCar told forbes.com. “So our role will be to just help them sort through all of that data and come up with a decision that works for them.”

The new TrueCar initiative is by far the boldest and most far-reaching array of changes from the profit-challenged company that, since its founding, has continually made efforts to reinvent itself. Starting with its creation 15 years ago, it has alternately courted consumer favor, then dealer favor, then consumer favor again, trying to find the sweet spot in the give-and-take that naturally arises between a dealer that wants to get the most profit on each sale and a car buyer who wants to pay the least.

Now, in an era in which consumers and dealers both agree that the speed and efficiency a sale can be completed trumps the transaction price, TrueCar might well have found that sweet spot.

“Our goal is to bring efficiency to the process,” Darrow said. “If a consumer knows what vehicle they want you’ve cut the time that it takes to create a transaction potentially in half. So if it’s a four-hour process to buy a car or five hours, we think we’ve taken that down to two or maybe less. And when you create efficiency for the dealer, you make his operation run better.”

A veteran in various roles at the company before recently assuming the interim CEO and president titles, Darrow admits that in the past TrueCar might have been myopically oriented on the purchase price to the detriment of the overall buying journey.

“If buyers knew what they wanted and were ready to buy a car, to go out and transact, we gave them a great experience,” he said. “But if they weren’t quite ready to buy, we didn’t have much for them.”

The new TrueCar experience will remedy that shortfall significantly. The site will still offer what Darrow calls the most accurate look at what consumers are actually paying for vehicles in areas relevant to each individual buyer. But that is only a part of the overall offering. The new TrueCar will feature tools that will help the car shopper identify the right vehicle for them. It will offer a more robust and helpful used-car experience complete with more than one million individual used-car listings. And, importantly, it will enable the consumer to choose the TrueCar-certified dealers with which their information is shared.

The ability to share personal info with just one dealership and to choose additional dealerships at the consumer’s discretion is expected to improve car buyers’ satisfaction with what in years past had been a sometimes problematic procedure. Previously, TrueCar users saw their contact information circulated to a number of dealerships far and wide, often resulting in a deluge of unwanted emails.

Darrow admits that wasn’t a good experience and expressed confidence that the new procedure will result in an experience that car buyers will appreciate.

“Our research indicates that the new experience delivers an NPS increase of 80-100%,” he said. “We think it gives the consumer much better reasons to connect with a dealer.”

Since in most instances TrueCar doesn’t get paid until the consumer buys a vehicle from a certified TrueCar dealer through that connection, honing that interface to perfection is important to the company’s future profitability.

Also important to TrueCar’s future profitability is the new, expanded used-car experience.

“This is an exciting piece of our business,” Darrow said. “Our used-car business is growing pretty rapidly. Through Q3 of 2019, we were up 20 percent on used cars and we’re excited about the opportunity grow there. The used-car market is about three times as big as new-car so there’s plenty of opportunity there for us.”

TrueCar’s new used-car experience includes enhanced price ratings that provide more precise price context for consumers, free condition/car history reports, and what TrueCar claims is a vastly improved matching algorithm that surfaces more relevant used-car inventory to car shoppers. But placing more emphasis on used vehicles also puts TrueCar into the same pond as bigger players like Autotrader, Cars.com and CarGurus. Darrow isn’t troubled by that.

“We know we may not be the lead player in the used-car space, but we’ve got about a million listings on our site. And we think we have a very competitive used-car product that our consumers are starting to gravitate to. So we’re excited about it,” he said.

TrueCar execs are also enthusiastic about expanding the company’s website and apps to offer more help to undecided shoppers who want to discover the right vehicle. Prior to the makeover, TrueCar offered virtually no help to shoppers who didn’t know what make and model they wanted to buy. The new experience will remedy that by offering vehicle reviews and “best vehicle” lists.

Lucas Donat, chief brand officer at TrueCar, points to those offerings as proof that his company is rolling over stones in an effort to better cater to women and Millennials.

“Previously we significantly under-indexed for women buyers,” he told us, “even against other third-party sites that also skew male. Now we’re changing that.”

In addition to more extensive tools, TrueCar aims to lure women and Millennials with a new, more colorful logo and some very inventive animated television spots that replace “the guy with the beard.” The TV ads depict life’s moments that trigger new-car buying decisions, things like having a new baby or getting a new job. Each spot begins with animation, which then transitions into live-action at the conclusion of each message.

“The animation tends to cut through the clutter and we can be very, very fresh and vibrant with that and actually change the story fairly regularly,” Darrow said. “But we’re always going to bring this back to there’s the reality of a consumer who comes out of this experience happy and we’ve been able to help them.”

As Donat says about the new spots and the web experience that they herald, “It’s vibrant, it’s joyous, and it’s the embodiment of our aspiration to create a world where shopping for a car is uplifting.”

In all, TrueCar believes the new web experience, which goes live today, and the new advertising campaign that kicks off next week will be game-changers for the brand.

“We are absolutely convinced that the winner in this space will be the one who does the best job of solving consumer pain points and providing solutions,” Darrow said. “And when you do that, you can get them at a place in the purchase process where they can be connected with a dealer and good things can happen. And that’s what we’ll stay focused on.”