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(bright music)
We all have in our mind a stereotype
of the used car salesman.
I was at the dealership for seven straight hours.
CarMax realized there really wasn't a good
e-commerce solution for used cars.
Why couldn't we be the ones to make it the most seamless,
the most personalized?
Our mission is to bring our lot to life online
and bring it to customers as fast as possible.
We know from experience
the best way to solve a big problem
is to give it to a product team.
So we may need to spin the car around
so that we can set the camera up in a different location.
I want to be in the lead.
I want to stay in the lead.
I want to set a new bar.
We could totally fit a kayak in here.
If you don't get ahead of the consumer
and give them the experience that they're looking for,
you run the chance of being irrelevant.
(upbeat music)
When I pick a car,
it's a car that I want to keep for a very long time.
I want to just be in love with it.
I want us to be almost partners in crime,
going and doing things.
(bright music)
Car buying is the second largest purchase
generally a consumer makes.
They do their research,
they visit different dealerships,
they're doing a lot of things online,
their test driving multiple cars,
and so that the experience really needs to put them at ease.
Hey there, you look like the kind of guy
who wants to buy a car.
We all have in our mind a kind of stereotype
of the used car salesman.
The the bad cheap suit, the pressure tactics.
Boss wants to know if I'm out of my head
talking about $150 over market value.
The deal is off?
Oh, dear.
Maybe they play weird games when you get in the office.
What do I got to do to make this a deal for you, huh?
I was at the dealership for seven straight hours
and when I pulled out of the dealership, I was just over it.
I didn't like the car, I didn't like the salesperson,
I didn't like the financing options I got.
So it was just a really crummy feeling.
They create a process that's designed
to take a very long time and wear you down.
People today are really sick of that experience
and just do not want to deal with it anymore.
(gentle music)
CarMax is the largest retailer of used cars
in the country.
We are the original disrupter.
We've been in business almost 30 years,
and we got in business 30 years ago to change an industry.
We're on the cusp of changing an industry again,
enabled by technology that's more seamless.
It's more personalized.
(gentle music)
That this is truly a historic occasion
because in just a few short minutes
CarMax will open its doors to the public
and the history of used car retailing
will be changed forever.
Consumers really weren't sure
if they were getting a good deal or not getting a good deal
and that's what we really tried to remove
from the whole transaction.
We tried to make every piece of the interaction transparent,
which was very different
than what historically had been done.
(bright music)
2008 was a really pivotal time
for a lot of companies like us because of the recession.
We stopped growth.
We had to really focus inward.
We had to get very, very lean
and we had to just become extremely efficient operator.
But during that time was really a renaissance
in Silicon Valley and technology that was driving
tremendous amount of customer change.
So we had the birth of mobile and social
and big data and AI and cloud computing
and all of these things
that were really lowering the barriers
to any company coming into an industry
and disrupting that industry.
We very much had our sites on the digital future.
We started progressing towards e-commerce.
There really wasn't a good
e-commerce solution for used cars.
Even though it's a complicated process,
why couldn't we be the ones to make it the most seamless,
the most personalized?
Quickly we discovered
a couple fundamental things had to happen.
One is we had to re-platform a lot of legacy systems.
Our old systems were great for efficiency,
but they were horrible at interconnectedness.
It's not good enough to have great technology
and it's not good enough to have great stores
if they're not integrated together.
And that's because a consumer
typically is going to go back and forth.
They're going to start online.
They're going to go into the store.
Well, when they go into the store,
they can't start all over again.
So we're looking for partners
to build the foundational elements of the digital backbone,
and Salesforce came to the top
because we wanted to select a platform
that is constantly innovating.
(bright music)
In recent years, CarMax has launched
what they call an omnichannel buying experience,
which gives you access
to their entire inventory of cars nationwide, online.
And you can buy at a store locally.
You can order a car from another market to be sent to yours
or you can order order it fully online.
Mr. Jones, looking to be around 400 to 500 per month.
Is that still the case?
All right, sounds good.
Within five seconds, an associate can look at a Salesforce
and figure out what have the customer done
and how best they can have a great conversation
with the customer to give them more control
on their transaction.
Salesforce allowed us to effectively connect
all kinds of other technologies that allow us
to bring new experiences and new products
to market very, very quickly.
Not that long ago, pictures were not that great.
Consumers didn't have a clear expectation
of what that vehicle really looked like and felt like.
Yeah, we're a great seller of retail cars,
but how can we make that experience better
and better and more impactful for our customers?
If you don't get ahead of the consumer
and give them the experience that they're looking for,
you run the chance of being irrelevant.
The challenge for CarMax is that many other competitors
have caught up in terms of technology.
There's a number of competitors who are showing up
and trying to disrupt in their own ways
that it now has to face.
We've seen startups come out
with some pretty good digital merchandising
and I don't want to seed that territory.
The reason for the urgency here
is because I want to be in the lead.
I want to stay in the lead.
I want to set a new bar.
When I present problems for our teams to solve,
I just tell them what the outcome needs to be.
How do we address the consumers new found requirements
to give them the same level of confidence online
that they've historically had in our stores?
We know from experience
the best way to solve a big problem
is to give it to a product team and let them run with it.
A product team is a cross-functional group of people.
So engineers, a product manager, a product designer.
The better the pictures, the better the descriptions,
the more immersive the experience,
the higher perceived quality of your product.
I think we have all the tools.
We just got to figure out now
how to really bring that lot to life online.
What we want to do is allow the consumer
the ability to navigate towards the perfect fit.
And you can only do that
if you're able to immerse that consumer
in that vehicle that they feel like
it's sitting right there in front of them,
even though everything is digital.
Hi, Ashley. Thanks for joining us today.
Hi. Thanks for having me.
The first thing they need to do is talk to customers.
And I just wanted to learn more about your experience
and your relationship with the car buying.
I'm just trying to figure out
what my next car should be.
What other options might exist out there
that could accommodate our family and our kids?
I need to be able to accommodate three car seats.
They wanted more information about the car.
If you're shopping for a minivan,
you want to know if a full sheet of drywall
can actually fit into the minivan with the seats down,
which is not what I would've assumed
would've been a top priority for a minivan shopper.
(bright music)
Our mission is to bring our lot to life online
and bring it to customers as fast as possible.
We encourage a product team to be scrappy,
to figure out the cheapest, minimum viable product
that's as lean as possible
so that ultimately, if it's not right,
we were able to fail fast and fail cheap
and didn't have to over-engineer something
that ultimately wasn't going to provide any value
to our customers.
A video would be a really good opportunity
for us to highlight some of the different
driver assistance features and help people understand
what that feature is actually doing.
Cargo space is going to be more tailored
towards generations of vehicles.
It'll take some work to group that together.
Safety features and the entertainment stuff
could be more easily applied to lots and lots of vehicles.
I think we could have some sort of like cool,
interactive drag and drop ability to place different items
and put them in different space in car.
The way CarMax works today is really
like a small startup company in a very large company.
We believe that if we have lot of experiments,
we have a much higher rate of success
versus having one or two big projects that takes longer.
We're looking at using real objects as one option,
seat configurations display.
I think the real objects.
Actually carry this too.
The next step was taking that problem
to our photo innovation lab, or as we call it, the pill.
That's filled with different cameras and equipment
and things that will hopefully help them problem solve.
So the first thing that we're going to try
is the junk in the trunk.
So we may need to.
I got a lot of junk.
Spin the car around so that we can set the camera up
in a different location.
Have you done this before?
No.
Okay, all right.
I encourage my teams to fail.
I think it was Edison that said,
every time he failed, it was just a thousand ways
he learned not to do a light bulb.
Now, stop.
Stop, stop.
Perfect.
So they had to learn about different camera settings.
That's really dark.
How do you create a gif?
And remember, none of them are professional photographers.
I don't see any (faintly speaking).
If that doesn't work, then we can try to separate it out.
If I push the camera down,
The angle changes.
as we're pulling the stuff out in between the shots,
it's going to mean that they're not lined up perfectly
when we want to play them as a gif.
And then I'll do one of it empty.
Yeah. I can't see the dark suitcases at all.
Yeah. I think we may need to invest
in some different colored suitcases.
(bright music)
All right, got it.
Now one foot out.
Got it.
Now fully out.
Got it.
This looks so weird.
All right. Well, we don't know until we try.
All right. So this feels like a great start,
but I think if we're thinking realistically
about the number of cars
you're going to have to start to capture
if this does end up being a win,
you're not going to be able to bring them all here
to the studio.
If we could practice in an outdoor setting
where we can try to control the light
maybe with like a tailgate tent or something like that.
So all that you needed to learn
was what was it going to look like to capture
this type of content outdoors.
You don't need to be at a CarMax location to do that.
The team moved to Marissa's driveway.
So I think we've got two main things
that we want to accomplish today.
We need to figure out how to control this
in an outdoor setting.
Really like controlling for the lighting
with the different things
knowing we're going to do this at the stores.
And then we also want to test some of the new props,
the bigger props.
I think we got all the corners.
Let's do the long, that side.
Like you go round driver.
And you Victoria, you walk around.
I just follow you.
Yes.
It feels unnatural.
(laughs)
All right.
That'll work.
Cool.
Let's figure out how the seats go down.
Okay. So you pull it, pull that up.
Pull forward.
And then pull it back, then that boom.
Just pull that whole thing out.
'Cause the seatbelt is.
All right.
We could totally fit a kayak in here.
Can we fit it in straight on?
You could totally fit more stuff.
Can you close the trunk?
Yes.
Can someone actually drive the car?
Yes.
Oh, okay. All right, you win.
All right. So we'll take one
with everything in it real quick.
Okay.
And then let's remove the cooler first.
All right. And now we'll do the kayak.
Here we go.
Come on, Sarah.
I thought you were blocking it.
All right, here we go.
Quick empty shot.
There's the chairs back in, the kayak back in,
the cooler back in.
It is kind of cool.
I really like the kayak in there actually.
Oh my god, drywall is so much heavier
than I thought it was.
Just lay it down in there.
Is it going to fit?
Yep.
Did you think a full piece of drywall would fit here?
I did not.
Oh, but look at that, it does.
And what a customer wants to understand is the leg room
and the head space.
Mess it a little bit.
Oh, you're going to break it again
And just position it like right on top of there.
Do ever I get the buckle of seatbelt.
Oh my gosh.
It's so creepy seeing him in the rear view mirror.
(laughs)
One thing I want to make sure we do start to capture
that we didn't get on the last one is time
from like beginning to end of the process.
Start to think about what our next steps are
to sell to as many cars in carmax.com as possible.
So feels good.
It's really exciting to see this start to come to life.
The team next went to a CarMax store
and set up a mini digital merchandising studio.
We roll cars directly from the retail lot
into this this mini makeshift studio.
(chattering)
(laughs)
All right. How's that?
You and your designer shoes.
Now just tell me if you need anything.
You're good.
Let's get him in.
All right. Got it.
All right. I'd put in this guy.
Got it, got it.
That was the last bit, I think.
I think that's it, yeah.
We just need to.
We got it all.
Great job.
How many did we do today?
I think a thousand.
That's what it felt like.
It was probably closer to 15 or 20,
but it did feel like a thousand.
So once they'd captured all of this content,
it was nail time to actually get it up on carmax.com
and allow our customers to experience it firsthand
so we could see how they would interact with it.
Double check on.
Hi, Emily.
It's nice to meet you. My name is Marissa.
I'm a researcher at CarMax
and I have a handful of my colleagues here with me today
that are going to be listening in and taking notes.
Does that work for you?
Sounds good.
(gentle music)
So once you land on the page
if you scroll down a little bit on the left,
you'll see below the large photo
a section that says Model Highlights.
That's the area that we're going to focus on today.
Were you able to find that?
I see.
Oh, yeah.
Okay. Awesome.
So now we'd love for you to pop open
maybe the one on cargo space
since that is an area that is really important for you.
Put your brain on speakerphone
and just react out loud to some of the things that you see
within that section.
The trunk that holds a lot of suitcases.
Well, this car looks super roomy.
Yeah, it's a very helpful picture
of like seeing how large the car is.
I would definitely use this because I would do comparisons
of the trunk space is pretty important to me.
I've always needed a car with a big trunk.
(gentle music)
On the 15% of the car pages that we made content for,
we showed 50% of visitors the new model content
and we showed 50% of our visitors no model content.
One of our goals was to get model content
to be one of the top five things that customers engage
with on the car page and we did achieve that goal.
It ended up being one of the top five.
Nice.
That's great.
And then we increased car page view to web lead submit rate,
which really is like a huge win for us.
I would say that was our main goal.
Without a doubt that it was a success
for our customers and for CarMax.
This content had some of the highest engagement rates
of any content on the car page.
So I definitely would recommend rolling out
this current content and also just like investing more
into this type of content in the future.
Awesome. That's a great
The team needed to figure out
how could they take what they had created
in this very scrappy way and scale it
across hundreds and hundreds of cars
in a relatively quick way.
It was time to hand off the torch.
The third party production company
that would be able to take us to a point
where we could capture all of these different cars quickly,
high quality, efficiently.
All right. Pull the first.
Are you just coming at it?
Good.
We can move to every day.
I feel like we need.
It's nice to have the handles facing out
so you can see what those actually are.
All Right, stroller.
Security.
Aww.
He's got that look.
(laughs)
All right, do the switcheroo.
Yep.
(gentle music)
Since launching the content, I've heard customers stories
like a gentleman who is 6'2", 6'3",
and didn't know how the backseat
would be able to accommodate him.
And just seeing the actual mannequins
really helped him feel confident
that that car was going to be comfortable for him.
Over the last couple of years,
CarMax market share has been growing
and we believe part of that growth is fueled
through all the digital tools and capabilities
we are deploying and enabling for our customers.
My lifestyle is very, very nomadic
and I was very lucky to find a job in e-commerce.
I could work inside, outside.
I could work in the woods with my laptop and work.
It was the best.
After I got my dream job,
I realized that it would be so much easier to have a car
to just go the places that I want.
And I saw billboards for CarMax
and I hopped online and once I had my filters dialed in,
I was able to narrow it down to the perfect car.
And I got on the little chat and I said,
"Listen, I'm picky.
I want to make sure that I'm happy with the car.
It's a huge investment."
And they said, "If you don't like it,
you don't have to keep the car."
It was very comforting
for me to know that they actually cared.
We set up an appointment
so that I could take it for my test drive.
There's not a salesperson in the car with you
trying to talk into anything you don't like.
When I pulled out of the lot,
it was almost surreal to just wrap my hands around the wheel
to feel like I wasn't getting taken advantage of,
and to know that this is going to be the car
that I'm going to drive for another five, 10 years.
It was such a great feeling.
Customers are going to continue to have their expectations
evolve in this space.
We've really just scratched the surface here.
There's so much more we can do.
CarMax has done an absolute wonderful job
of transforming not only our company,
but the entire industry over the last 30 years.
I think we've raised the bar
for what it takes to effectively compete in this industry.
And my goal with the little car
is to see 48 of the states,
take it down to Mexico a couple of times.
And when I'm done with that, turn around and do it again.
(bright music)
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