Hyundai Rockar-ing car sales at Bluewater

Hyundai’s new car ‘shop’ at the Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent has seen 100,000 visitors in its first six months and real sales from new customers.

Last September, Hyundai announced the arrival of Rockar, their new, all-singing, all-dancing digital sales channel that would ‘Rockar’ sales for them, although they weren’t brave enough to make Rockar an on-line only experience.

That decision looks like its proving to be the right one as it’s revealed that the physical presence for Rockar – smack bang in the middle of the Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent – has had more visitors than the Rockar website.

In fact, since the Rockar store opened in November last year, they’ve had 100,000 visitors come and see what a store full of car stuff is all about (the Rockar website has had a more modest 78k visitors in the same period), and Hyundai are impressed, not just with the footfall but with the demographic too.

It seems the average age of a Rockar buyer is just 37, 60 per cent are female and 95 per cent are new to the Hyundai brand. Which would suggest the Rockar experiment is reaching customers a traditional Hyundai dealer can’t reach.

Tony Whitehorn, Hyundai’s UK boss, said:

We are delighted that Rockar Hyundai has experienced such a successful start.This innovative retail proposition is challenging the existing automotive retail model because it is taking the product to where the customer is. It’s raising brand awareness and importantly interrupting people who are not shopping at Bluewater with the intention of buying a new car.

What Hyundai aren’t making clear in their press release on the Rockar store’s impressive footfall is just what their conversion rate is – are they actually flogging cars, or just seeing visitors?

A bit of digging around and we understand Hyundai are expecting full year sales from the Rockar store of around 1,000 cars. That might not seem a lot out of (we assume) 200,000 visitors, but it’s probably a chunk more than the vast majority of Hyundai dealers manage.

The sales will also be managed almost entirely by the customer – a bit like self-service tills at a supermarket – with test drives bookable and doable at Bluewater (a third of test drives result in a sale), part-ex quotes taken care of and overheads that must be a fraction of a traditional dealer outlet.

All of which is great for Hyundai and, paradoxically, their dealers too. Because if the demographic of Rockar had been the usual Hyundai one, then why would they need dealers?

This way, it seems to be win win.