Gaining a competitive advantage.

You are the service manager at a very popular yet small fast-service shop in town that is located on a crowded corner in an old two-bay service station. You have developed such a good reputation for providing high value with a competitive price, convenient hours, and friendly and professional personnel that you are swamped with work. You have so much work that you’ve had to go to an appointment system and are currently booking appointments for oil changes and tire rotations two weeks in advance. As a result of this you have had several customers confront you and threaten to change shops even though they love the quality of your work.

You Decide

What would you do? Which of the following options would you consider to improve the convenience of your shop?

a. Go to a complete second shift to double shop capacity?

b. Add on two more stalls in the parking area and purchase nearby land to park the cars?

c. Raise prices to slightly slow down runaway demand?

d. Consider all of the above suggestions after carefully reviewing them?

Your assignment is to find an automotive service ad in some form of local print media (newspaper/flyer/ magazine). The purpose of this exercise is to see how many of the different marketing principles you can see applied in the ad.

You Decide

Review the ad and circle and mark those items in the ad in which the company has used any and/or all of the following marketing principles:

—Price

—Performance

—Convenience

—Availability

—Quality