Digital Signage Solution for Ford 4S Stores
Changan Ford Automobile is the joint venture enterprise of Ford in China. Founded in 2001, it has achieved a great success in the market with annual sales of over one million vehicles. To stand out of the competition certainly requires lots of work to do, among which one remarkable action taken by Ford last year is the construction of a comprehensive digital signage solution for all of its 200+ 4S stores.
Unlike other automobile brands, like Toyota or GM, who has started their 4S store digital signage system 2 or 3 years earlier, Ford entered
this area in a relative slow pace. However, the good thing for starting later is that one can learn from others’ experiences for its own benefits. That is partly the reason why Ford could end up with such an innovative solution.
Requirements
As what was observed by Changan Ford marketing team, most 4S stores use LCD kiosk of vertical screen, with rectangle outline. Despite of the different sizes and colors, the general conception is basically the same, like what has been a fashionable style in the industry. Ford deliberately wanted something extraordinary and inspiring, for it intended to create a brand new experience for its customers, something better than the existing impression. Through over one month of deliberation and modification, one particular design coming from Betvis drew the attention. The whole design comes with concise appearance and shinning gloss on the metal shell, making it always be at the focus.
The Solution
Unlike normal vertical screen for 4S stores, this kiosk comes in landscape display with 55 inch in diagonal, much larger than ordinary 43 or 46 inch. Apart from the appearance, its user interface is also quite unique. Customers can touch the screen to search vehicle model, engine type, internal structure and all the relevant information. Comparing to vertical screens, this landscape screen comes in with an angle, allowing customers to watch in a more comfortable position. Also since landscape is similar to tablet, customers can get familiar with the operation much faster.
“Reaction from customer has been great since these kiosks were put in the showroom. No matter men or women, adult or children, people like the feelings of fascinating images sliding on their fingertips.” Said one 4S store sales manager. “ We thought such a complicated system must come with an intricate operation instruction, which would require several days to master, what is absolutely to our surprise is that it is straightforward and easy to learn quickly.”
To guarantee the best result available, highly professional software is totally critical. How to schedule multiple videos and pictures playing in loop, while at the same time keep the content open to on-demand interaction is a tricky job. Thanks to Betvis DSM digital signage software, people from the 4S stores learned how to publish and update their promotions in just a couple of minutes. Not only were they able to change the content anytime as they want via a centralized cloud server, they can also remote control, like scheduling on/off time, or getting operation statistics report of each single kiosk.
What Changan Ford and Betvis managed to do in this project was inspired from some of the best digital signage solutions ever being constructed in whole China. For being good was certainly not enough in this case, extra efforts was required to make all the amazing things happen. Now with hundreds of these extraordinary kiosks deployed in all of its 4S stores, Changan Ford is ready to pursuit an even larger market share here in mainland China, with bigger ambition and expectation. While at the meantime, Betvis also learned a lot from this 3 month long journey, partly from the corporation with Ford, partly because it really took a lot of effort from Betvis R&D procedure and the whole production process.
Why Betvis
Over the past few years, Betvis has already provided more than 2,500 custom made kiosks and screens for world famous brand 4S stores across major cities in China like Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xian, Guangzhou and Shenyang. Different 4S store dealers want their digital signage system to be unique in various appearances, sizes and functions. Thanks to its outstanding design capability and manufacturing capacity, Betvis was able to satisfy all sorts of requirements with almost 100 percent success rate.
Meanwhile, unlike some other digital signage providers who are only specialized on hardware manufacturing, Betvis has a brilliant software application team to make every single solution dedicated to its own unique application scenario. All the key elements from system structure, terminal selection, display effects, data application to user interface design are carefully designed and modified to meet any particular demand.