Summary

Paul Smith, Group Marketing Director at the Hendy Group, joins the Cambridge Marketing Podcast. He provides a comprehensive overview of the modern automotive retail landscape. He discusses the fragmentation of the customer journey, the historical waves of international car brands entering the UK market, and the current rise of Chinese manufacturers. Smith detailed Hendy Group's marketing strategy, which focuses on building trust, managing a complex multi-brand portfolio, and creating a systematised customer experience. He also touched upon the importance of ethical selling, the unique and long history of the Hendy Group as the first Ford dealer outside the US, and concluded with an appeal for new marketing talent to join the rapidly evolving and complex automotive sector.

 

Key Points

  • The core business of automotive retail had shifted from car sales and persuasion to being a "decision confidence business" focused on reassurance.
  • Customers arrived at dealerships highly educated, having already conducted weeks of online research, which fundamentally changed the role of the sales team.
  • Consumer thinking was fragmented, focusing more on practical considerations like monthly cost, availability, and sustainability rather than traditional categories like "new" or "used."
  • The UK market had experienced successive waves of successful international brands, starting with Japanese, then Korean, and now Chinese brands, which were challenging old stereotypes with high-quality, affordable vehicles.
  • Effective customer experience was described as a "system, not a moment," requiring consistency across all touchpoints, from advertising to after-sales service, to build and maintain trust.
  • Hendy Group's long heritage was a key asset, used to build trust and demonstrate resilience, but the company was careful to position itself with "progressive credibility, not nostalgia."
  • The automotive industry faced significant recruitment challenges and needed to attract new talent by highlighting the sector's complexity, rapid pace of change, and opportunities for problem-solving.

 

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

 

Paul Smith (00:01):
Our guest today is Paul Smith, a senior marketing leader at Hendy Group, one of the UK's largest automotive retail groups and the largest continuously trading car business in the country. Paul leads marketing across multiple brands, channels, customer segments, and brings a rare mix of heritage of brand stewardship and modern data-led marketing. Today we're talking about the marketing automobiles is changing and what other marketers can learn from it.

Kiran Kapur (00:27):
Hello and welcome to the Cambridge Marketing Podcast. As you'll hear this morning, my guest today is Paul Smith, and Paul has a background as a presenter as well as being the Group Marketing Director at the Hendy Group. So we are in the world of cars and automotives today. Paul, thank you very much for that introduction, which is a lovely start to the show. Can you talk me a little bit through the sort of market overview and the changes that you've seen in the automotive market?

Paul Smith (00:56):
Of course, I think motors can be perceived as quite an old-school sort of industry. It's been around a long time, and cars, I don't know if they're really the most sexy topic these days for some people, but I mean it massively is much more interesting than it probably appears. So one of the biggest shifts in automotive retail is that we're not really about a business of car sales. It's a decision confidence business. So historically, customers used to visit a dealership really early in that journey. Today, by the time they speak to us, they've often done weeks of research online, compared like finance options, they've read the reviews, they've watched YouTube walkthroughs. There's lots of influencers online who will tell you their opinion, and that can often be quite confusing. It can often conflict with what you formally read in sort of trusted locations or whatever.

(01:53):
This is the age of fake news, but it really affects how people see and trust in brands that they're looking at. And the thing about automotive, the car market today, that's the same. It never used to be that way. It used to be a lot more trusted, and today it's a lot more sort of confusing. But by the time people come to us, they've often configured that car multiple times. So what we see is that retail has shifted from, rather than in the past, it was persuasion. It's now to reassurance. That's probably the first big thing. There's another thing which is like fragmentation. Customers don't tend to think in neat categories like new or used as much as they used to or actually anymore at all. It depends how you see it. They think in terms of monthly cost, availability, and now increasingly, sustainability, as cars are petrol burners in people's eyes of course.

(02:52):
So that's triggered a lot of emotion. Convenience is a really big thing. We don't have time these days, and busy lives and ever-increasing traffic everywhere. But then also trust, right? So someone might start looking for a new electric vehicle, but they've already switched to a used hybrid vehicle, and then they end up in a salary sacrifice scheme that the company's offering or they could have mobility difficulties. So they're eligible for the mobility programme. But from a marketing perspective, that means that joined up thinking this is really essential, and that's changed a lot. And then I'd probably say also the things on the back of my mind is this cultural shift. People do expect the same experience that they get from brands like Amazon and Apple, because why wouldn't you? They have so much fame, but clarity, transparency, speeds, everything's available online, and it's exactly what the brand say it's going to be.

(03:52):
But they also want that sort of human reassurance, because buying a car is still really emotional, and it's extremely high value. They talk about it being like one of the most expensive second, most expensive thing that you buy in your life. I'd argue it's the most expensive because if you buy a house, it usually appreciates, and there is some value at the end of it, whereas a car always depreciates and incrementally feels like it's more expensive. So when you're balancing those two things of emotional and high value, it's where modern automotive basic marketing lives basically. Quite a lot has changed.

Kiran Kapur (04:28):
Yes, it sounds like it. That's before we've even got into the brands that are available, which we'll come onto in a minute. So I'm really intrigued that you said it was all about decision confidence now, because actually I think there's a stage, presumably customers can get lost in that. I mean, I'm famously keep my cars going as absolutely as long as possible because I hate buying cars. I hate the whole experience. I find it really confusing. I also can find it quite patronising, but we'll come onto that later. So presume, do you lose people in that pre-bit before they even get to you?

Paul Smith (05:00):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean they're lost before they're even found. Often we don't find people until they're 90% through the whole process, and then they grace us with a visit to basically reassure themselves that what they've done is right for them. But that's the biggest shift of all, right? The education level for people is exceptionally high. And often, I mean if we're being open about it or honest about it, they come more informed than sometimes our sales colleagues do because they've researched it to an nth degree. It's like people singing the songs of an old rock band, but they remember the songs words to themselves and the band can't even remember them sometimes. Always reminds me of that, doesn't it? It's your song. How come you can't remember the lyrics? But it's meant to be. It's not a slant on salesmanship as such, but we sell so many products and so many different features and so many different options to buy them.

(05:58):
It's really tough keeping up with it. But the thing that really matters, I said sort at the start there, you come in so prepared, and you think you know everything. So you want this blue car, it's electric, it's new, and this is a deal. And you've kind of spoken, probably even Googled what prices are, real prices in the background. You leave buying a pink non-electric car that's used that was probably significantly higher in its original retail value than you thought you could afford. You financed it, which you were adamant you didn't want financed, but actually that was such a good deal. You've left with it, and you've added something on. And if you were to almost have a comedy sketch, it would be like slightly ironic, you walked in, this is what I'm having, and you left out with the opposite. You left with the opposite. It doesn't always work out that way, but you'd be really surprised that in the final 10%, that reassurance piece can shift everything. Go figure, right?

Kiran Kapur (07:02):
Yeah. Okay, we'll come back to that because that's such an interesting way of handling a customer as well, because the last thing you want is the customer to feel that they've come in with this idea and you've sold them something they weren't expecting. They've got to feel that that's what they wanted to have. Not that they've been fobbed off on anything, which I'm sure wouldn't be the case. Lemme come back to that. Can we talk a little bit about the branding and the changing of car brands? Because I mean, I remember my parents talking about the rise of the Japanese cars coming in, and this was all very exciting and above all, It was a Toyota, and Toyota changed the marketplace, and then other brands have come in, and other countries have come. So can we talk a little bit about the history there?

Paul Smith (07:48):
It's a fascinating story. It's a kind of cultural story really. But I mean originally it was the rise of like you say, Japanese brands and they were always seen as real outsiders and tin pot cars. It would never work over here. Quite the contrary. They were exceptionally well built, very reliable and remained to this day. Japanese brands are often still the most reliable brands you've ever existed since cars were made. But that journey of West in Britain, we had a million British English brands, Scottish brands as well, but they were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, and they quickly died out in the early 19 hundreds because they were more like Backstreet garage brands and they only sold a few cars by hand. Then you have this sort of mobilisation and mass engagement in automotive throughout all the different decades that you come. But post-war is when it really changed.

(08:42):
So after the war, German brands were not that popular of course for historical reasons, but you start to see the Beatle coming into being sold in Britain and America, which was fascinating because it really was designed under the Third Reich. It was a mobilisation brand for a very difficult topic, part history and time. But it's funny how the waves change. So the Germans arrived, the Japanese takeover, they had a great couple of decades, and then the Korean brands, which was Kia and Hyundai, and it's not Hyundai. Hyundai, it's Hyundai. You'll hear that in the advertising actually recently. They're talking about pronunciation and how important it's to the brand, but they've been fantastic. Kia is in basically third place in the UK market today, and I remember when it arrived, there's a tiny little car that you wouldn't want. It was called the Kia Pride. It had Whitewall tyres.

(09:41):
It's tiny, really, really small. Do you remember Lada and Skoda? We had those sort of historic comedy brands. We always had a joke about ladders, and Skoda lads still is the same, right? But Skoda is now this wonderful premium brand owned by the Volkswagen group and has been deeply successful over the last probably 20 years, and specifically where it's a wonderful brand. And then today we've got Chinese, which is it'll never work in Britain. Chinese brands, Chinese stereotypes around quality, its Chinese belt's going to be bad built, absolutely untrue in every conceivable measure. The Chinese brands are exceptionally affordable, exceptionally well built, very well designed, most of them being designed by European design teams, which helps, because it makes it more palatable to our eyes. But the truth is that nobody makes a bad car and never really has done now for decades. So your choice isn't going to be driven really by perceptions or realities of workmanship. It's now really all about the brand and how you associate with it.

Kiran Kapur (10:51):
So let's come back to Hendy Group itself. So do you represent brands? Is that the correct way to say it?

Paul Smith (10:57):
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it's a franchise model, isn't it? We have a contract, you sign a selling contract, and you have a repairing contract, and those two things can actually be separate. So you may well just service and repair cars in a local area, but you don't sell them. So that's how legally the two contracts separate. But it's a choice for us for sure, who we would like to represent. And it's also a choice for the manufacturer, the brand owner itself. They may want more representation in certain towns or less representation. It just depends on a lot of strategic thinking between the two of us about what's right for us and what's right for them. If you think about who we are, we operate across several overlapping markets, which is where marketing gets really interesting and quite complex. So you think of it geographically, we're focused on the south coast of England mostly. You go down to Exeter all the way along to sort of Brighton. So we're covering about four or five different counties here. But demographically, we cover everything. You're talking first-time buyers, high net worth, your car is worth 20,000 pounds. It's the cheapest level all the way up to almost hundred thousand pounds, most expensive. And of course, we're covering individuals that live in rural communities to urban centres, big cities, small towns. It's the right mix geographically and demographically.

Kiran Kapur (12:23):
As a consumer, and we'll start with the consumer marketplace because it's the easiest one to conceptualise. I would drive along, and I would see Hendy Ford. I mean famously, Hendy was the first Ford, and I will let you talk about that in a second. So I'd see Hendy Ford or Hendy another brand, would they all be together? Would that add to my confusion?

Paul Smith (12:45):
Yes. I mean, it's called multi-brand, the kind of nickname for it. We have these showrooms, and they're quite big old things, quite expensive things, because cars are not small items. You can't just put multiple mobile phones on a table, and they're not set in the corner of a concessionary. It's a big footprint. So we have to make it work. And the old days of having, what they always called with gin palaces, where every single brand has its own palace, those days are not as strong as they used to be. They're still there. We still have pressure if you like, that brands would love us to be solace represented in most places. But I think the commerciality, automotive is actually a very low margin business overall. It's perceptively, you think we make millions and billions because of the value of the vehicles, but as a percentage level, it's actually very, very small.

(13:38):
I mean the industry benchmark is somewhere between one to 2% return on sales as an industry, which is usually quite shocking to those who know what that number means. You might be looking for an excess of 10%, so volume and carefulness and add-ons and making sure that we do actually have good extras like finance and all this kind of stuff. It really, really matters. So when we put brands together, it's for a commercial reason to make sure that we can be viable locally, but it's also what people want, and that's the tough part. So what we might want to show as a brand or a franchise dealer is not always what a customer wants. So there's always that friction between the two sides of the view. So if you think about brand choices, basically should be strategic. We look at things like long-term alignment, the values, does it fit with our family values?

(14:38):
What's the innovation roadmap for those brands? The electrification strategy, which is super popular today, what level of customer support does that brand offer? And then just basically, how well does the manufacturer fit our customer base as we see it in our geography, as we know it better than anyone else. So we have to think in terms of decades rather than sort of quarters if you like. And once you've got multiple brands. So the risk is that you've got choice overload and customers just, but you know this, but you don't want a catalogue of confusion. You want guidance. So our marketing focus, when we come bring it back to marketing here, it focuses much less on here's everything we sell. Wow, hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of bundles. It's more on helping customers self-identify with what matters to them. So I get example would be like this brand is for you if you value X. This powertrain makes sense for you if your usage looks like Y. This option works best if monthly costs matters to you more than ownership. This is a big topic. So that clarity is a marketing responsibility as much as it's a sales one.

Kiran Kapur (15:46):
Interesting. So since you mentioned marketing and sales, obviously again, we're all familiar with the idea that we walk into a showroom and a salesman will come and talk to you and you have a sales process, but you said you are distinguishing between the marketing and the sales side. So whatcha doing on the marketing front to help with that

Paul Smith (16:03):
Customer experience is a system. It's not a moment. That's the important thing to realise. If it was all left down to a moment in time, then we're in trouble because it's basically everything is at risk, because it's human-led and emotional-led, it shouldn't be that way. It should be systematised. So marketing plays a role long before and long after the transaction. So from expectation setting in our advertising, it's really clear we've got to be trustworthy, the clarity that we provide in pricing, to the follow-up communications that come after sale, and then how we respond to things like reviews. So a very practical example of this would be we aggregate customer feedback across all the different surveys that we have. So the manufacturer survey themselves, they might interview customers after the sale, and we get the feedback from that on a system that's sent to us.

(17:00):
We have Google reviews, we have other systems and other suppliers who try to do reviews on our behalf like judgeservicereputation com. And we have a whole lot of internal metrics as well about our own behaviour and our staff's capabilities. So really what we do is we bring that all into single reputation view, and that allows marketing, and operations, and leadership of course, to see the same truth and then we have to be obsessive about that consistency. So if our marketing promises transparency, easy to do, the showroom experience has to deliver it, not easy to do. So if we talk about care and community, that has to show up, and how issues are resolved. So for marketers, it's a really great reminder that brand isn't what you say at all. It's what people experience repeatedly in real life.

Kiran Kapur (17:51):
I love the message that customer experiences a system. I think that's so important because we do tend to think of it as moments and we call them moments of truth, but actually it's the whole thing is systematised and I'm really interested, what you didn't say was, oh, we do net promoter score, we look at our NPS, you talked about all sorts of other things that you're doing when you are systematising.

Paul Smith (18:12):
Yeah, welcome. I'm quite experienced in Net Promoter Score, I go right back to the early training days when it was an American car dealership group that coined the phrase. I remember going on a training course for it, and systematically I've watched it not be a correct system ever since. And Net Promoter Score is thrown around just a buzzword, and it's almost consistently wrong, because all people focus on is that 0 to 10 rating. And then you've got promoters and detractors, and you have be a little formula that works out what your score might be from minus 100 to plus 100. And then you arrive at the answer that you are plus 80 in the score, and isn't it amazing? You go, well that would be the highest recorded Net Prometer Score ever known in the human history of mankind. And it seems like our Google reviews are still really poor. I don't like it, I loved it, and now I don't like it because of the way it's been used or misused over time. It's a really powerful metric and if it's used as its original intention was, which was to power the business to make core decisions based on the results of it, which would affect remuneration, affect everything I do and have seen it worked, I've implemented it and it has worked before. I would say 80% of the time, I just think adds such little value that it's now something I would recommend that we actually move on from. You've got to find a different way of measuring of true reputation.

Kiran Kapur (19:46):
Clearly, the Hendy Group has other ways that you are analysing it.

Paul Smith (19:51):
Well, we do, but I mean, I must say that we are always under pressure because we have brand franchises that sometimes the franchise absolutely love that metric, and we have to use it because that's what they want to use. So you're polite about it, and you engage in the best way possible. But if it was my decision, I wouldn't use it in that way for sure.

Kiran Kapur (20:12):
Thank you. I'm very intrigued by how the product portfolio management goes because there's so many brands and so much potential confusion in the marketplace. How does that even work on a strategic basis that you can actually look at the number of portfolios. Because again, we tend to teach this as a Boston Consulting Group. Everybody loves the Boston Consulting Group. It has cows in it and stars and Problem Charts, and actually, in the real world, that's not how we deal with portfolios.

Paul Smith (20:44):
No, no. Everyone loves a BCG acronym. I mean portfolio management, I dunno. I mean idealistically, it would be different. If we had a perfect world, we would balance everything in a perfect way. So we only had the right segments at the right time in the right place. And unfortunately, it doesn't really work like that. Everything overlaps, and we have legislation to deal with as well actually, which is interesting with cars, how you sell and where you sell. And the selling practises are governed, like many industries by law. But we have a thing, had a thing from multiple decades called Block Exemption, which was European legislation that interfered with automotive selling practises to make sure that we weren't appropriately selling to customers and price fixing and all these sort of things because there's been so much bad practise over the years if you go back decades and stuff.

(21:39):
But that actually affected how we balanced the portfolio, because the choices that we had as a dealer group and as a brand were diminished in a way that you couldn't quite place what you wanted to do, and you couldn't create territories that were unique anymore. Whereas I look after Southampton, you look after Portsmouth, and we'll build a Hadrian's wall between us. I'm Scottish, hence Hadrian references. But it's a very relevant, Portsmouth and Southampton football teams would probably attest needing a head Hadrian's wall for sure, but you wouldn't cross a divide. But portfolio management is much more than territory. It's about clear brand architecture, centralised messaging frameworks, shared customer data and insight, strong internal communications. That's what we do behind the scenes. So we don't market products on isolation at all. I mean, we market sort of Hendy as a trust mobility partner. And whether that's new, used cars, mobility, fleet servicing, finance, the tone, the values, all the visual language, it all stays consistent across the portfolio, but it's behind the scenes that we're managing the architecture and the frameworks. So a customer might buy a used car a day, they service it next year, they then move into an electric vehicle the year after. And if those touch points feel disconnected, then basically we're eroding trust. So consistency doesn't really mean doing everything in the same way. It means that it's recognisable intent, if that makes sense. And that's how we manage sort of market large, a large portfolio consistently.

Kiran Kapur (23:16):
I mean one of the areas that we haven't really, we've sort of basically touched on was finance, but I mean that's becoming a huge part. What it's a huge part of the industry now,

Paul Smith (23:26):
Well is and it's also it's heavily regulated because you've got to be careful that you don't pressure sell people into a product that's absolutely not right for them. You were alluding to this a little bit earlier. It's that finance, it goes back to the banking crisis, doesn't it, 2008, for those who can remember? But subprime lending and everything, it's not appropriate to sell certain things to certain people even though they might want it. And somehow we can do some kind of check to see if you can afford something. Maybe it's technically true, you could afford it, and you can get finance, but it's the ethics that come behind it, right? It's not just selling a car. You're tying somebody into contracts of affordability for 3, 4, 5, 6 years, and we've got to make sure it's the right thing to do for people. So ethical selling is absolutely the heart of what this industry is about, and especially Hendy for sure.

(24:25):
There's no question that's the family value coming through. And it's not just finance. I mean there's other products as well. You can get insurances, and assurances, and warranties and multiple things that do genuinely add value to your life if it's right for you at that moment in time. A good example, you might curb all four of your wheels within six months of buying a car. So actually it would make a lot of sense for you to take a tyre and alloy wheel policy, and you say, oh, I don't really want that. It's more money per month. It's like, yeah, but it's going to pay back for you tenfold. Maybe not tenfold but fourfold. So take it, and it's our job to make sure that we have talked to you to understand who you are and what you need and how you need it, and then match the products, the multiple products that we've got to match how you identify and how you operate as an individual.

Kiran Kapur (25:17):
And as you said, I could come into the showroom, actually as you were saying it, I was thinking, gosh, if you bought cars with me before, come into the showroom going right, I'm going to buy a red Volkswagen and walk out with a sky blue, pink, something totally different. And yes, I can exactly see how that could happen. We've talked a little bit about Hendy, but please can you talk about the Hendy history? It is fascinating.

Paul Smith (25:40):
Oh no question. I mean Hendy is genuinely unusual. We are the oldest continuously trading car retailer in the UK. I've got to get that right because it's a little bit interpretation. There's a couple of car dealers who Caffyns who were on the south coast as well. They started selling cars in 1903, and we started selling cars in 1910, but our company was founded in the 1850s. This is before cars even existed. That's engineering firms or selling carriages or bicycles, that type of thing. So Hendy's is one of those companies that's absolutely truly ancient. I think it's 167 years, this year. The other side of this was when we did get into cars, which was a wonderful story because in 1910, Henry Ford himself, the Henry Ford, got off the boat in Southampton to investigate setting up the first manufacturing plant that would've been outside of America, which was going to be up in Manchester at Trafford Park.

(26:45):
So he came over the boat on the slow boat, if you like, into Southampton and Percy Hendy, who was the generational Hendy at the time, met with him and agreed the first what would be conceived as a dealer contract to sell cars on behalf of a brand that didn't really exist before then. So what makes Hendy is the very first Ford dealer to be appointed anywhere in the world outside of America. So that's the first in the UK, first in Europe and to this day still a Ford dealer, unbroken history, which is phenomenal. But also think I was looking at this, how many dealers are still trading in America that were appointed before us, and there's only two. So we are the third-longest continuously trading Ford dealer in the world. It's amazing, isn't it? But the thing is, it's important. It's not about nostalgia, and this is a big risk for brands that have got long history with them.

(27:45):
We default to looking behind the past. It what powers everything. And I must say it isn't about nostalgia, it's about mindset. The business has survived by constantly adapting. Every generation's face disruption as you go into historic disruption like mass motorisation. Originally, the end as the oil crisis, is plural, then digital arrived, and the millennium that we've got electrification today, and it's truly disruptive. So internally, I mean heritage isn't about the way that we've always done it. It's about resilience and trust. And then if you take that from a marketing point of view, what do we do with it? What gives us a powerful foundation? Basically, that's how I treat it. So customers trust us because we've been part of the community for generations, and that's evidence. But we're very deliberate about not letting that heritage make us look old-fashioned. Although it can feel that way at times. We've got to be careful. But the challenge is expressing progressive credibility, not nostalgia.

Kiran Kapur (28:45):
That's so interesting. Of course, the other big thing about Hendy, which you haven't actually mentioned is that Hendy family are still involved. I think you're on the fifth or sixth generation, but again, as you say, that gives a lovely stability. But you've also got to not look back, mean so many brands do sort of sit on their laurels and say, well, we've always been here, so we will always be here. Well, that's just not the case.

Paul Smith (29:08):
Well, I think the challenge is actually staying relevant and successful. I mean, we certainly have challenging times, but Paul Hendy, who is my boss, ultimately his wife Rebecca, got three children in the business. Ben, lovely gentleman, works in the marketing team in my team. We've got Will who runs one of our largest dealerships over in Kent and Ellie, who works in people department. But the three children are very actively engaged. They're all in their twenties and doing different jobs. Rebecca runs the foundation, which is a very unique, beautiful thing. It's a charitable, a full charity set up a number of years ago that gives small donations to multiples of small unrecognised charities locally around the south coast, rather than the famous ones. So that family business, and there's others, there's John and there's Claire who work in the director roles with us in project management and state management. And you can feel it, the Hendy it's not just a name.

Kiran Kapur (30:10):
The sort of final thing I wanted to ask was if somebody listening is going, wow, automotive industry isn't somewhere I'd actually thought about before, but I'd really, this sounds like a happening marketplace, which it clearly is. How could somebody get into this sort of area? How could a marketer sort of move their career into automotives?

Paul Smith (30:29):
Well, first of all, it would be a pleasure that somebody wanted to, because I think we're under so much pressure that recruitment into this industry is one of our biggest risks and people have got to stop judging automotive for being the past because it fundamentally is not, it doesn't matter about if you're a marketeer, wants to come into the marketing department. Talk about that for sure in a second. But if I go a bit deeper, I talk about apprenticeships and technicians, parts people, sales advisors, anything like that. We are a human-run belt business. We have big showrooms, we have big workshops. We need people to want to be engineers and technicians and to get their hands dirty and work in showrooms and stuff. And often the threat is that people want to work from home or they want to just live a digital existence or be an influencer or whatever.

(31:18):
Especially with the youth coming through, right? We've got to be able to somehow change this. We are losing Britain. It's not the same in everywhere as well. This is a British issue, but we are losing the desire to be working in the built environment. And it was almost a cry for help. Please help us overcome this. But if I think about three things, so firstly, you don't ever underestimate the complexity of automotive, right? Automotive marketing teaches you more about customer psychology, data, regulation, pricing and operations in almost any other sector I can think of. And it's a gift. So if you're curious and you like to learn, this is a great place to be. Then secondly, get, you've got to get close to the front line. So you have to want to spend time in dealerships, in service departments, call centres, the back office and stuff like that.

(32:19):
But the best automotive marketers understand the business. They're not just about channels. And I guess that's the same for most industries, but the behar is cause we have such a built front end that you can't be hiding from it if you don't understand the business. All of the best marketing technique doesn't cut through. We do see that actually in our team. The accusation, if you like from the front line is that the marketing isn't driving awareness or lead generation or whatever. But often you can see, but the clicks are great and look at the metrics and look at the analytics and look at the cost lead and look at this and it's great. But then you can see that it doesn't always translate into a change in behaviour or a trigger for customers to come in. So you can have that. There's a real risk that disconnect marketing actually commercially isn't functioning very well, but that's not how you would've been taught, right?

(33:11):
But it's the reality of how it actually works in real life. I was going to say three things. The third thing, oh yes, sorry. Remember, this industry is basically changing faster than people realise. Electrification, subscriptions, AI, of course, the same for everyone, but direct-to-consumer models, it's all in motion. How things used to be is absolutely not how they are now, and definitely not how they're going to be going forward. So if you like solving real problems, like at scale and a hell of a pace, and then automotive is a really brilliant place to build a career. Its basically, it's not just about selling cars, it's about shaping how people move through their lives. If you could say it that way.

Kiran Kapur (33:59):
That is fantastic. If that doesn't encourage people to want come into the automotive industry, I dunno what will. Paul Smith group marketing director of the Hendy Group, thank you so much. I've learnt a huge amount as we've been talking. Thank you so much for your time and expertise.