Mercedes has had a presence at the New York auto show for decades.
After skipping the Detroit and the Chicago auto shows earlier this year, Mercedes-Benz plans to skip the 2020 New York auto show in April of next year, as well, Automotive News reports; Mercedes’ attendance of the LA Auto Show next year is also in doubt. Mercedes has had a major presence in the annual New York springtime event for at least four decades, making the planned departure a significant move in a major luxury car market, but also part of a growing trend over the past decade.
A number of European automakers, most notably Volvo, have cut back on their auto show presence, preferring to spend their advertising and PR budgets in other ways. Those other ways have tended to be social media campaigns spread out over a longer period of time, rather than one specific week in one given city, but they’ve also tended to be drive events not hosted in major cities at all. It’s also worth noting that BMW skipped the New York auto show in 2019, despite having a lot of customers from the northeastern U.S. states. Along with Audi and BMW, Mercedes skipped the Detroit auto show earlier this year—the last one to be held in the month of January—ahead of its move to June for 2020.
Is the auto show business model becoming obsolete as automakers seek to connect with car buyers in other ways?
This has certainly been a trend as advertising on the internet and on social media has lured automakers away from investing millions of dollars on displays that largely sit around for two weeks for the benefit of the press and potential buyers. It takes weeks to set up displays prior to the day that the doors actually open, a stretch that has proven expensive and cumbersome for all automakers involved.
Some automakers are also beginning to question whether those flashy displays are driving enough customers to their dealers to justify the expenditure, Automotive News notes, but the alternatives to the traditional auto show, which hasn’t changed much since the 1960s, aren’t always in online advertising campaigns.
Mercedes and BMW are both experimenting with local events such as the “Ultimate Driving Experience” roadshow hosted by BMW in over a dozen cities, offering driving opportunities for visitors that would be tough to find in Detroit in January or in the middle of New York City. Mercedes, meanwhile, has opened up temporary stores in luxury malls, seeking to reach their target buyers by coming to them, rather than waiting for them to come to the Javits Center in NYC during one specific part of one month per year.
Source: Read Full Article