Sports Marketing: Turn Sports Fans into Your Fanatics
From professional leagues to local teams, billions of dollars are spent on sports marketing annually. Businesses are using team and venue sponsorships, live event advertising and more to reach potential buyers where they enjoy spending their free time. More and more tire manufacturers are branching out from traditional motorsport activities to include other sports in
Rise of the Machines: Competing With Robots and Other Automated Adversaries
It’s fair to say that when most of us in tire/auto service sales business think of competition, we think of real people and not robots. But what if there were a robot that could do your job as well or, brace yourself, better than you? If I were an owner of the business that had
A New Model
Over the last several months, BKT Tire’s operations in North America have undergone considerable change. Where once BKT Tires USA Inc. in Akron handled all of the India-based tiremaker’s business here, now BKT Tire based in Nashville handles all OTR tire sales and service, and BKT Tires USA Inc. focuses on ag, industrial and ATV
Effective and Desirable
2014 was a hell of a year, wasn’t it? The ups and downs were familiar from past years, but there was also a growing sense of optimism pervading the country and our industry in particular. A positive feel in the business – and in people’s wallets – for the first time in quite a few
Loads, Faults and Drains
A good battery with an adequate charge is absolutely essential for reliable cold starting. A weak battery, or one that is rundown, may not deliver enough amps to crank the engine when temperatures plunge and the oil thickens. Cold weather can be hard on batteries, but so can hot weather because it increases water loss
Tire Testing From A to Z
There are three principal reasons tire manufacturers test their products: Competitive Benchmarking – From material formulations to overall tire performance and on-vehicle testing, engineers want to get a firm grasp on what the competition offers prior to the development of their next new tire. Research and Development – To develop a new tire, manufacturers test
Steer Axle Tires
While every single tire position on a commercial tractor/trailer is important, the most watched tires on any rig reside on the steer axle. They are the first to touch the road when a driver pulls out of the yard, but more importantly they are the only tire that will eventually reach every axle positions. And
Innovation To Come
Seven years into the great experiment that is mandated TPMS, the data on underinflated tires is pretty clear. An estimated 414 fatalities, 10,275 non-fatal injuries, and 78,392 crashes occurred annually in the U.S. due to flat tires or blowouts before tire pressure monitoring systems were installed in vehicles, according to government stats. If the tire
Inverse Marketing
Every tire business relies on marketing, but times are changing. Imagine lower-cost, more impactful messages reaching people who may have never even heard of your shop. Marketing is a process of you telling people how good you are. It is a well-established practice, and has been effective for decades. But today something called “inverse marketing”
It’s a Noisy World
Know that all brakes make noise. When the friction material makes contact with the rotor, the coupling causes the brake pad and rotor to oscillate and vibrate. The components are locked as a combined system that will vibrate at its natural frequency, called “force-coupled excitation.” The driver hears this excitation as noise. The amount of
Driving Improvement
Tire Review’s Tire Industry Benchmarking Study – a comprehensive, objective look into the inner workings of a modern tire business – provided quantitative and actionable data for tire dealerships to drive improvement. Driving Improvement is a monthly analysis of those practices that separate Platinum Performer tire dealerships from everyone else. Click a link below to download.
Surviving a Century of Change
The three generations of owners of Hogan Tire & Auto Service have seen a century’s worth of change. The family-owned tire dealer in the greater Boston area has survived and grown despite wars, the Great Depression and vast technological advances; events that changed the business landscape across the country. It all started in 1915 by
