When it comes to how people most enjoy spending their time, shopping for cars ranks somewhere below jury duty and going to the DMV.
To Cars.com Senior Director of Brand Marketing Seth Goldberg, who has researched consumer attitudes about car shopping extensively, that stat represents both a challenge and an opportunity.
Through relentless experimentation, iteration and user testing, the Chicago tech company wants to make the car shopping experience better. In fact, if they have their way, buying a car will one day be as fun as driving one.
FOUNDED: 1998
EMPLOYEES: 1,600 (1,000 local)
WHAT THEY DO: Cars.com is a digital automotive marketplace that creates connections between car buyers and sellers, helping each consumer buy the right car for them.
WHERE THEY DO IT: Chicago
DRIVE TO GIVE BACK: Employees can take one day off every year to volunteer for their favorite charity or organization.
PARENT SUPPORT: Cars.com offers parents up to 12 weeks paid leave, and a support group for mothers that meets regularly.
Ryan Page, VP of Product Design
Ryan leads a team of designers who create products that help people find their dream cars online. His team uses research to envision the future of car buying — and bring it to life.
BEYOND WORK: If Ryan isn’t at work, you can probably find him on the soccer pitch. His weekends revolve around the sport, whether he’s watching his children’s soccer teams or collecting scrapes and bruises from his own recreational matches.
What attracted you to Cars.com?
I was inspired by the idea of reshaping a process that so many people find overwhelming and stressful. It’s not hard to see that the automotive world is poised for significant change, with the rise of ridesharing, subscription services and autonomous vehicles. There’s no shortage of interesting problems to tackle.
How does your team find out what customers want from your products?
We have an in-house experience research lab, a dedicated research and insights team, and in-house customer panels for surveys, strong testing and experimentation that allow us to get ideas in front of many people quickly. Ultimately, we love getting out in the field and talking to both car shoppers and car sellers in person. We collect those inputs to understand where the automotive market is going overall, and overlay our depth of experience in understanding car buyers and sellers.
How does that user-centric approach influence your team’s work?
We take an integrated approach to product development, which means we’re one of the key disciplines in shaping the direction of our product experiences. As a team, we utilize some of the approaches and mindsets from Lean UX. We break down our ideas into component, testable parts and place them in front of real users as we build and iterate. This helps us understand what’s working, and what can be improved upon.
We recently launched our Matchmaker experience, which was a result of those methods. The feature helps early-stage shoppers better understand and feel confident about selecting the right vehicle for them. It leverages our editorial expertise, our human-centered approach to design and our 20 years of consumer and vehicle data to deliver tailored recommendations.
Data always informs the landscape of where we want to investigate, and it is supported by diving in more deeply.”
How does your team prioritize ideas?
We consider impact along a number of dimensions. We ask ourselves: What will materially improve the experience for marketplace participants? What will drive business results for Cars.com as an enterprise? What helps to create foundational capabilities and change behavior over time? What can we build and launch as a test to learn whether our assumptions are on target?
Data always informs the landscape of where we want to investigate, and it is supported by diving in more deeply to understand the “human why” within particular areas.
Seth Goldberg, Senior Director of Brand Marketing
Seth drives brand strategy for Cars.com. His team aims to understand the needs of car shoppers and sellers to help guide them in the shopping experience.
BEYOND WORK: Seth seeks out hobbies that broaden his perspectives on other people and cultures, be it through films, plays, museums or traveling.
What attracted you to Cars.com?
A common curiosity about human behavior and how and why people make choices intrigued me, as did a meaty challenge: How do you redefine and rebuild a brand for a 20-year-old company in a category people hate?
Our data shows that people would rather clean toilets, attend jury duty or go to the DMV than shop for a car. That challenge, the people and the culture were all major factors that attracted me to Cars.com.
How are you shaping the brand at Cars.com?
We love our cars, but shopping for one sucks. We’re focused on making car shopping faster and more efficient, but it’s the second biggest purchase most people will make in their lives. People are looking for ways to navigate the process — not just rush through it. So we looked at a lot of brands outside our category to learn from them. Airbnb helps you explore communities, not just book a room; Netflix and Spotify provide recommendations based on your viewing and listening habits.
Auto marketplaces, like Cars.com, have traditionally asked you to know what type of car you want when you start the shopping process, but more than 70 percent of people don’t. Our goal is to help people navigate the thousands of options out there so that they have a more personal, fun experience while shopping for a car.
Our goal is to help people navigate the thousands of options out there.”
How does your team collaborate with the product design and tech teams on a project?
It’s imperative that the promises we make in the stories we tell are delivered in our product experience. We want to help people understand and engage with those experiences. So, we build cross-functional teams that ensure we are all informing each other’s work.
For the launch of our Matchmaker feature and corresponding ad campaign, we identified the opportunity for our brand to move from the role of listing aggregator to auto matchmaker. The marketing, product and tech teams worked together to build an AI-powered experience, and the resulting ad campaign showing people romantically swept off their feet by their car matches.
What skills make a person successful at Cars.com?
The number one trait is curiosity. I like to see people who want to question and understand things. When we have this curiosity, we are open to new ideas, new ways of working and new ways of solving problems. I also look for people who are willing to take a stance, yet open to change. We want candidates who are comfortable with ambiguity, and who are collaborative and willing to roll up their sleeves and do the work. Most importantly, I look for candidates who are going to make coming to work every day more fun and interesting for me and the team.
