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Dress code when visiting car showrooms for a test-drive

You may be the customer here, but your chances of getting due attention will only get better if you appear to be a genuine prospect with real interest. This is especially true for first meetings. Appearance is a loosely used term here, and doesnt refer to your dressing style alone, but any indicators of your purchase power and interest in buying.

BHPian vidyabhushan recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

The forum is full of anecdotes as how some dealership didn't pay adequate attention to a prospective buyer because of his/her appearance.

While some of these instances can be attributed to safety (viz. a Harley dealer in Pune refusing test ride to prospects turning up in shorts and slippers), most instances (especially in luxury car buying) are related to 'profiling' i.e. how a sales advisor interprets prospect's appearance to judge how much attention should be awarded to the prospect.

Knowing how some of us have felt when at the receiving end, I am inviting your views on the topic, hoping this also helps us realise the dealership's perspective.

Are the dealerships justified in demanding a dress code?

I could think of some reasons / scenarios:

1. When dress code is associated with security - for instance heavy bikes like Harley are simply unsafe to be ridden in shorts and slippers

2. Luxury car dealerships associating your purchase power by your appearance - this cannot be justified, but perhaps empathized with. Being in Sales role myself (although an entirely different kind of sales), I do understand the importance of 'qualifying' a lead. When you are selling to an organisation (B2B), its easy to research about the organization and qualify. Even in B2B sales, only 10-15% of the opportunities / leads actually convert to a Sale. In a retail sales scenario (B2C or C2C), you can only qualify a prospect based on appearances - this kind of profiling is subjective and can easily go wrong, and sales advisors are often aware of the risks.

To explain this a bit further, a typical luxury car dealership probably receives enquiries of which only 5% are customers with real intent to buy and purchase power too. These 5% would perhaps make their choice between several luxury brands on offer. For instance, assuming I have the money and intent to buy myself a 40-50 lakh luxury car, I would visit Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Jaguar, Volvo and the likes. So despite being a qualified prospect, the probablity of any one brand selling me a car is only 15-20%. For a dealer, this means that only 5% of footfalls are qualified prospects of which perhaps one-fifth will actually become customers. So footfall to sale ratio is perhaps 1-2%.

Of course these numbers are hypothetical and vary by city, brand, time of the year and several other factors. But I hope it helps us see things from a service advisor's perspective.

Some best practices that better your chance of getting a good buying experience

1. Appearances matter: You may be the customer here, but your chances of getting due attention will only get better if you appear to be a genuine prospect with real interest. This is especially true for first meetings. Appearance is a loosely used term here, and doesnt refer to your dressing style alone, but any indicators of your purchase power and interest in buying. Dealerships offering test drive vehicle at your house / office, can also meet this objective.

2. Be honest and upfront: If you are only enquiring for experience / knowledge / on someone else's behalf, be upfront and moderate in your expectations. I have done several enquiries on behalf of my parents / in-laws etc. and almost every time, dealerships did understand my role as 'influencer' if not the 'buyer', and I got the same treatment as a prospect buyer would. If you intend to make a buying decision in 3 months or longer, please be transparent. SAs often come up with limited time offers, valid for this month only, which I got for the car eventually bought 4 months later.

3. Discuss the car and dealership's offers etc. but let the Service Advisor offer you a test drive (dont ask for it): This is also to the buyer's advantage. SA offering test drive means he / she considers you a qualified prospect and willing / flexible to make a sale. A prospective buyer could use this to his / her advantage in the negotiation.

4. Do your homework on the car: BHPians dont need to be told this, but get to know the car you wish to purchase. Even if you aren't a car guy, basic idea of price bracket, luxury segment, top features, similar cars from competition etc. are easy to gather from a few YouTube videos. Your pre-read about the car also shows how serious you are about this potential purchase. Don't be afraid to mention a couple other cars you are considering and what you like about those cars. On the personal front, gather your thoughts around the budget (down payment, loan planned etc.), so you get straight to business with the SA.

Please feel free to add your thoughts and inputs !!

Here's what BHPian Shreyans_Jain had to say on the matter:

Pre purchase dealership experience is generally fair and pleasant across the board. You do have the occasional unprofessional or judgemental salesman, but that is something that transcends all brands. I have never visited any dealership formally dressed ever. My usual off work attire is shorts and t shirts, and I have had decent interactions with all kinds of salespeople in that, from Maruti to Mercedes. It is more about your body language and the way you conduct yourself than your clothes. Ditto for high end stores in the mall.

On a related note, I’ve had the habit of enjoying an espresso at a 5 star hotel every now and then, since my college then. Even back then, when we looked like typical college kids driving dad’s old WagonR with the CNG cylinder for the world to see in the security check, the experience was always good. Appearances don’t matter when your credit card speaks for you.

There is one brand I will single out for being unnecessary snooty in all my interactions with it. Volkswagen. Multiple dealerships across multiple states. Man, those guys are like we only want to sell to the senior management of MNCs type people. I, being a business owner, don’t fit the stereotype. Needless to say, my garage been VW free. Maybe it is something in their training. They can keep their ‘we are German, superior than you’ attitude, I’ll take my business elsewhere.

Here's what BHPian V.Narayan had to say on the matter:

Fact is all of us in all scenarios of life consciously and sub-consciously make an assessment of the person metaphorically across the table and judge him/her as a part of our over all sensing of our environment constantly. We do it in business meetings, in water cooler chats with colleagues, in shops, at parties, in interviews, at condolence meetings et al. And also when attempting to buy a car or going out to sniff things out in a showroom. And yes the sales person being no different from us judges us by our appearance because in the first 30 seconds, he/she has very little else to go by. So we should not grudge him that. When two strangers meet the first thing, behavioral scientists say, they notice are each others footwear.

Where car purchase visits to a show room go last 15 years or so the tendency to under dress has become more prevalent in most especially those on the younger side. It is a mix of changing norms, more casual wear in trend, and I dare say a loss of knowledge of how to dress appropriately for different occasions and, at the risk of getting lynched, an attitude of inverted snobbery. We can dress casually and yet smartly and comfortably without degenerating to casual and slovenly. I notice a lot of the latter these days than say 25 years ago. This incongruence is most apparent at condolence meetings and dinner parties. We see people going for condolences in shorts so often! And some couples go for dinner invitation with the lady dressed to the nines and the man's dress code completely out of whack.

And if we go to look at, test drive and evaluate a Rs. 50 lakh car, then there is nothing wrong if we went in hawaii chappals and half shorts but then also we should not fume if we did not get the attention expected. We confused the other side with our signaling. But we needn't blame ourselves, this is a trend world wide. Just as most would dress appropriately for a job interview, there is no harm in doing the same if we are going to evaluate cars - the second most expensive asset we usually buy.

Personally speaking, I like taking the trouble of dressing appropriately for the occasion; maybe a result of my father being ex-military where there is a dress code for each occasion both in and out of uniform. And there are so many shades of dressing within the casual-smart casual range. And just as I would dress appropriately for a party or a business meeting or a visit to a friend, I would do the same if prospecting for a car. It helps when meeting a stranger not to send confusing signals.

Here's what BHPian SmartCat had to say on the matter:

More appropriate question is: Would a car salesman's dressing sense & the way he presents himself influence your buying decision?

It is the car salesman's job to impress customers. Not the customer's job to impress car salesmen!

Here's what GTO had to say on the matter:

General Motors had a 10-page policy for dress codes! Mary Barra changed it to two words = Dress Appropriately. I'd say the same for visiting car showrooms, or any other workplace as well (e.g. government offices). Like it or not, as humans, we all have our prejudices and assumptions. When I was in a sales role in my plywood & education businesses, I most definitely was influenced by the customer's dress code. I don't visit car showrooms at all because I get all the media cars at home, but when I do, it is usually a Team-BHP t-shirt (that's all I wear during the day, 7 days of the week), smart denims, smart shoes & a branded watch. It's actually my staple attire for most of my daytime outings.

Plus, think of it from the salesman's point of view. Truth is, there are many tyre kickers & time wasters in car showrooms worldwide.

My personal attire policy is thus = better overdressed than under, be it a friend's birthday celebration at home or a wedding function.

Here's what BHPian ABHI_1512 had to say on the matter:

Would have loved to answer point by point but would like to keep it straight and simple. The best practises that you mentioned is already there in the forum, so would not go there at all.

The moot question is whether appearances matter or not and whether dress code influences the seller or not. Something tells me that if someone wants to buy a car, the salesman looks for intent of the buyer and not necessarily the dress code!!

Of course, being presentable matters but at the end of the day, what matters is the knowledge of the vehicle that one intends to buy. If someone is well versed with the specifications of the prospective vehicle, half the job is done there itself.

I, if one can believe, have often visited showrooms wearing casual cloths and sandals even and the salesmen have taken me seriously. And I have seen many serious buyers doing that as well. Also, the attention given was almost at par with market standards as well.

Being snobbish doesn’t work in Sales and here, I often quote to everyone a dialogue from the famous movie ‘Pretty Woman’ where Richard Gere famously said and I quote "stores are never nice to people, they are nice to credit cards"!!

I think one can make out what I intend to say, doesn’t matter what one decipher’s though.

Check out BHPian comments for more insights and information.

 
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