Trend: Truth Awareness: Car Dealer Honesty

I've been brewing a theorem for a minute about a rising tide of raw truth running throughout much of today's merchandising and advertising strategies.

Within this On-Demand age of increased control and unlimited choice has evolved a new “Truth Aware” consumer, who is endowed with a veritable x-ray vision of previously hidden facts, pricing, production process, program codes, and backstage workings of politics and business. This growing sophistication is downright forcing brands and politicians into a strategic corner to just give up the truth in the sell.

One great example of this growing Truth Awareness is via AdPulp, who points to a Florida car dealer's blog.

The President of Earl Stewart Toyota goes AWOL from his dealer fraternity and exposes the truth about car buying on his blog,Earl Stewart On Cars

Featuring raw truth topics like "What to do if you are Treated Badly by a Car Dealer", "Always Get an “Out the Door” Price", "The Right Used Car is a Better Buy than a New Car", or "Bait and Switch Advertising - Read the Fine Print", he gives open advice to car buyers and owners on how to deal with dealers, service people, and the typical pitfalls to avoid.

Here's a sample:

The “Big Sale Event”. If you look in today’s newspaper, you will find that most car dealers in your area are having a sale of some kind. It may be because of a current holiday, “too large an inventory” of cars, to “reduce their taxes”, “the manager is out of town”, or some other nefarious lure. Advertising 101 says that you should give the prospective buyer a “motive to act”. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter whether the motive is real or not. The fact is that most car dealers do not sell their cars for less during “sales events” than they do at any other time. I point this out so that you don’t rush your buying decision. If you don’t buy a car during the tight time constraints of a phony sales event, you can negotiate just as good a price the next day. The exceptions to this are legitimate rebates offered by the manufacturer. These often expire at the end of the month which is one reason why the “last day of the month” really can be the best time to buy a car”.

How refreshing: a dealer communication without hyperbole and slick imagery, but rather, an eye-to-eye truthiness about the car buying process and benefit to you the consumer. Ironically, this simplicity endears the reader to the dealer in a way that decades of "crazy ed" histrionics never could.