Selling Cars in the Metaverse - Mobility Moments with Sitecore's Aswin Mannepalli

The car buying experience might be about to undergo the biggest transformation in a century as automakers consider moving away from the traditional dealership-based model toward a direct-to-consumer model.

However, this change would have been completely unfathomable if were not for the internet. With drivers being able to access information at the press of a button and a swipe of a mouse, rather than a flick through a brochure and an awkward chat with a dealer.

Sitecore's Aswin Mannepalli, Global Director of Strategy and Marketing tells us how the car-buying experience is changing in the age of the metaverse and how the company works with Honda to streamline the purchasing experience.

Can you explain the changes you expect to see coming into the car buying experience?

Digital tools have slowly enhanced the car buying experience over the past few decades. At first, consumers would only use the internet to do their research on car models and determine available selection at their local dealership. While digital channels have played more of a supporting role in the car buying experience, we’ll soon see them completely transform the process of browsing and purchasing a vehicle.

In the near future, the metaverse will make car configuration easier and more interactive than ever. No longer will consumers have to go into a dealership and list off their desired features and capabilities, only to find out that their dream car is thousands of miles away. Today’s consumers want to be able to see and experience these features in real-time -- and they refuse to go from lot to lot to do so. The immersive nature of the metaverse can help solve this obstacle by bringing a selection of customizable cars directly into a consumer’s home.

This level of convenience is extremely important to consumers, as we saw in a study we recently commissioned with Microsoft. This research underscores consumers’ appetite for digitally enhanced car buying experiences, finding that most global consumers say they are more likely to buy a car if they can do so directly from a website (51%). Even more importantly, one in two consumers would be willing to buy a car without test driving prior to purchase – and for those who say test drives are nonnegotiable, one in three say a virtual test drive would suffice.

What does the Metaverse allow prospective car buyers to do that the internet currently doesn’t?

When buying a car, the moment a consumer is most likely to commit to purchasing the car is when they press the accelerator for the first time. The metaverse will allow consumers to get to this point faster than ever. It will give car buyers the opportunity to explore and experiment with a vehicle in 3D environments that mimic real life. With the real-time configurator, it will also provide a personalized experience that is simply not available in person at a dealership. With a simple command, consumers can go from looking at a black car to a red car or swap a sedan model for an SUV.

In addition to helping with car shopping, metaverse experiences will allow car brands to educate and train consumers on how to effectively operate vehicles. For example, many consumers are now considering buying electric vehicles for the first time. Deploying on-demand training via a metaverse experience will show customers how to use these vehicles in an immersive way, which is far more effective than a 2D training video on YouTube. This can include everything from 3D tutorials on how to charge their EV to best practices for maintenance. 

Will online car buying cause the death of the traditional dealership model? Is this a worry?

Technology will help reimagine the dealership as an experience centre. By deploying digital experience tools – from interactive mobile apps to more advanced metaverse experiences – dealers can streamline the car buying process and ensure buyers walk into the dealership with all their questions answered and their minds made up. Not only will this ease the path to conversion, but it will also help dealerships be more profitable.

Online-first car buying allows for a more personalised experience, does the automotive industry currently have the tools to support this? If not, why?

At a philosophical level, there’s tension between consumers wanting a shopping experience that’s tailored to their needs and not wanting to give up sensitive information that makes personalization happen. For the automotive industry, OEMs are struggling to understand where they fall on this tension point.

The biggest challenge when it comes to personalization today is that cookies are going away. Businesses are losing the ability to track their customers and understand who they are, what’s important to them and how they expect to shop. One shift we'll soon see across industries is brands starting to own customer data and becoming good, responsible stewards of it. If they do this, they can start to regain some control over understanding their customer base – having an idea of a shopper coming onto their website and, for example, clicking on a family vehicle instead of an outdoor RV. From here, they can begin the telemetry process of using consumers' unique interactions to segment car buyers into persona groups. This is all possible on the current version of the internet.

In the next iteration of the internet (i.e., the metaverse), personalization will be even more complex but more rewarding. The complexities will primarily stem from the new variables required to deliver immersive 3D experiences. Brands will be working with completely new types of content, and they need to be more sophisticated in creating, managing and hosting this content. Additionally, they must be more strategic in understanding which content needs to be served, to whom, and at what moment in time. Another challenge is that the metaverse provides new degrees of freedom since consumers are brought into a seemingly infinite 3D world. In the metaverse, personalization is how brands can be a digital sherpa -- bringing consumers back to a critical path. It’s not just delivering the right content at the right time, but it’s also anticipating consumer needs and nudging them toward a path that aligns.

How does Sitecore work with Volvo and Honda?

There are some exciting use cases and customers that we’re talking to about the metaverse that I can’t share right now. What I will say is that our approach prioritizes use cases that solve actual, real-world problems. Metaverse solutions allow us to solve the problems OEMs and dealerships face far more elegantly.  

This philosophy towards customer value follows what we’ve already done with Honda Acura and Volvo to solve direct-to-consumer problems through digital experience, for example.

Is there a chance that older, rural, or less able drivers might get left behind by online-first buying experiences? How can this be prevented?

Automotive brands and dealerships know that their core buyers are middle-aged and older, and this is where they are focusing a lot of their marketing spend. While this demographic is not as likely to put on an Oculus to shop for their next car, they are certainly becoming privy to using digital tools and websites in their research. In the years to come, we expect that this age group will even be willing to see a metaverse experience that does not require an intrusive form factor or goggles (i.e., a mixed reality experience).

To be successful with metaverse deployments in the years to come, auto brands will need to create different levels of experiences with varying degrees of entry. For example, creating a website-only metaverse experience and a more complex version accessible through some form of holography. This will ensure they are able to meet the needs of every consumer – from early adopters who already own headsets to those still getting used to online shopping.

While the metaverse is a new flashy concept in the marketing world, I firmly believe that successful experiences will be grey or boring. They need to be seamlessly baked into existing workflows and channels that your customers are already comfortable using. Calling too much attention to the metaverse will make the medium seem foreign and overwhelming when it’s actually just an extension of car brands’ current digital experience. By making it as natural as possible for consumers to discover and use the metaverse, we’ll see adoption – and online sales -- steadily rise.