Cox Automotive’s broad portfolio of products and tools —spanning Dealertrack, Dealer.com, VinSolutions, vAuto, Xtime, Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book, Manheim, and more—was powerful but confusing for dealers and difficult for sales teams to communicate.
This was a chance to fundamentally redesign Cox Automotive's go-to-market system and build a full sales enablement toolkit to equip frontline teams to sell an integrated solution—shifting from fragmented product pitches to a unified ecosystem that better reflected how dealers work.
The new approach simplified seller workflows, increased cross-sell opportunities, boosted portfolio engagement, and clearly articulated “why Cox” as a connected growth engine for dealers.
Cox Automotive is committed to transforming the way the world buys, sells, owns and uses vehicles. As one of the world’s leading providers of consumer and dealer automotive software solutions, Cox Automotive has assembled an end-to-end portfolio of automotive software brands and products that addresses almost every aspect of the automotive retail experience.
But Cox Automotive wanted to harness the collective power of its portfolio and position itself as an integrated operating system—one where dealers shift from siloed product conversations to a cohesive ecosystem story, sales teams gain easier access to information and cross-selling opportunities, and marketing engagement accelerates.
To take on this challenge, the Cox Automotive’s AVP of Marketing for Software Solutions invited Vivaldi to collaborate with her and her team. Together we crafted the strategy for this story and then brought it to life with dealer advertising.
To ground this work, the integrated Cox Automotive / Vivaldi team conducted focused discovery across the 5-Cs: Company, Customers, Category, Competitors and Consumers. This work revealed the distinctive differentiators of Cox Automotive’s retail portfolio, as well as some legacy dealer perceptions to be addressed. With these insights, together we crafted a go-to-market messaging architecture and worked collaboratively to refine and build internal alignment to the direction. We then created a digital and print campaign to launch the portfolio strategy leading up to the annual National Automotive Dealers Association conference, as well as enablement materials to help Cox Automotive Sales leaders tell this story face-to-face with their dealer customers.
The portfolio communications strategy was widely acknowledged as a great success in helping dealers better understand “why Cox.” It also created opportunities for sales reps to cross-sell within the portfolio. Paid media for the campaign achieved a 73% increase in click through rate (CTR) versus the prior campaign, and Google display ad CTR increased an astonishing 8-fold.
Vivaldi is proud of its ongoing collaboration with the Cox Automotive team, as they lead the future of the automotive retail experience.
