The main stumbling block, when trying to promote advanced driver training, is that we do not have a continuation of learning culture in this country. That is to say that once the course of learner driving tuition has been completed, and the test passed, that is job done.
As far as nearly all motorists are concerned, both young and old, when on the railway line of personal development, the learner driver test is the buffers. The end of the line and with no more driver skills required.
How to Inspire People to Take
Advanced Driving Courses
If you speak to anyone in the business of selling, and ask about the secrets of their profession, you will be told that to be successful in sales you need to generate perceived need. This creates a wanting for whatever the product is.
Another technique is to create a fear of missing out on the opportunity to have whatever the product is. If you can manage to generate both within a single sales package then you will be very successful.
If we try and apply that model to advanced driver training it will be quickly realised that to bring about success will be very difficult. For a start, how many car drivers think they need more driving tuition, even if it is at a higher grade?
The only way you can create a perceived need for something is for the individual within whom you are trying to create that sense of need to visualise what they will be buying into. That is to say, to create a wanting in someone for something, that someone has got to understand what the something is.
Advanced driver training is not a tangible item. That is the first obstacle. Secondly, as advanced driver training is a commodity that is to be experienced, unless anyone has got experience of the product, how are they to understand what it is they are buying into?
If anyone did have the experience of completing an advanced driving course, by default they would already have received the input and therefore already be trained.
Driving Tuition
is for Learner Driver’s, Right?
Going back to perceived need and creating a sense of missing out on something, you recall we said that you can only create a perceived need if the potential customer can visualise how they will use the product, or at least understand what they will gain from buying into it.
Where advanced driver training is concerned, all people will have at their disposal, if to appreciate the concept of higher grade driver skills, is their own life–experience.
Unfortunately, all that will consist of is their personal memories of their course of learner driving tuition. Who would want to go back to that again?
So you see, trying to use the most powerful sales tactic known to man (perceived need) falls straight on its face. Even though advanced driver training is nothing remotely like learner driving tuition, that fact somehow gets lost in translation.
As far as creating fear of missing out, those who are supposed to be in fear of missing out, in order to be so in fear, have to understand what it is they are supposed to be fearing they will miss.
Again, to achieve the objective, the potential buyer of the advanced driver training again only has their own life experience to draw from, which again will be the experience of a course of learner driving tuition.
Advanced Driver Training,
There is no Role Model?
As perceived need and the perceived missing out concepts won’t wash with selling advanced driver training, something else is needed.
What about a public association with the product by a public figure, such as a celebrity. You see it in television commercials and bill boards all the time.
One of the most effective uses of this technique has been that of selling insurance; particularly something like life insurance or personal accident cover.
If you have a product that you feel might not be that interesting to the casual public observer, and then run an advertising campaign fronted by someone who is not only a celebrity, but a British institution, that is your route to success.
This has been achieved using publicly recognised figures such as Michael Parkinson, Gloria Hunniford, June Whitfield and Esther Ranzen, very well.
What is the Best Way to Promote
Advanced Driving Courses?
When using a public figure, would he or she have to be someone known to be associated with motoring? That is a good question, but how would the public react to being offered the concept of advanced driver training seen to be endorsed by Jeremy Clarkson, or any of the BBC Top Gear presenters?
The fact Jeremy Clarkson is not the best advert for good driving practice would not matter. It is the fact the man commands a large following by petrolheads the world over actually counts for more.
Remaining sober for a moment, can anyone honestly say the words Jeremy Clarkson and advanced driver training can ever be acceptable within the same sentence? That’s like putting together the words Katie Price and brains.
What About Someone From the World
of Motorsport?
Okay, but what about those who command a high profile in motorsport? Indeed, if you ask anyone in the street who they admired as a driver you are bound to hear names of famous racing drivers being offered. Not those of road drivers, because no one knows any.
On that note, whilst you would get a very lethargic response when offering anyone advanced driver training, even for free, you would get a completely different reaction if you were to offer a course of track driving tuition.
So, who would you use as a role model to inspire ordinary drivers to take up advanced driver training?
Well, there are quite a few celebrities with connections to motorsport to choose from, but the matter of fact is, it is all academic anyway. That is because if there is a celebrity to be involved, money has to be involved too – a lot of money.
Money is where any notion of having an advertising campaign for advanced driver training fronted by anyone of note just dies in the water.
Advanced Driver Training
is Not Seen as a Worthy Investment
The simple fact of the matter is that where advanced driver training is concerned, no one who has the financial means to support such a notion is prepared to do so.
Those who would wish to support advanced driver training, as a concept, in this way, do not have the financial means by which to do it. Therefore, you have a stalemate situation.
Advanced driver training, as a concept, will continue to be enthused over by those who have received the benefit of such advanced driver training.
Those who can only imagine such a thing to be a repeat of their learner driving tuition will forever shy away from any effort to progress their driver skills. After all, their cars get them to where they need to get to, so nothing more is needed.
However, to complete a course of advance driver training, for those who dare, really does open up a whole new world of car ownership on the road. It takes what is perceived by all but a tiny few as an ordinary and everyday process up to a completely new level.
To appreciate advanced driver training you have to actually experience the Advanced Driving Course, and that is all there is to it. When you do, that is when someone turns on the light in your up–until–then dark little world. |
