The nine year old son of a shop owner looked up from his video game when his father walked into the room. The boy said, "Dad, I had to do a math project for school last week. We were supposed to compare different amounts of the same thing. We had to go out and compare a lot of something to a little bit of the same thing. So I got this incredible idea! I decided to count cars! When mom dropped me off at the shop after school I counted 642 cars driving by! And I counted 3 cars in the shop. I got really good at counting cars and at comparing numbers all at the same time!" Dad was a little shaken up by this fact. It was the truth. As young boys see EVERYTHING including parents’ reactions the boy said, "Isn't that great Dad?" Luckily the Dad snapped right out of it and said "Yes son that's super! Nice job!" Dad didn't sleep well that night. But he woke up the next morning with a powerful purpose. He decided to tackle his car count problem. But how was he going to do it? It's not like he hadn't tried to solve this 100 times before....

The above story is an all too common story in our industry. Marketing is a big subject that is not well understood by a lot of people, and as a result, owners are suffering financially from a lack of traffic into their shops. So we are going to start at the base and work it up from there.

First off what is this thing called MARKETING? Marketing is the action of making a target audience or a specific type of public (in our case people who operate vehicles) aware of the goods and services an activity has to offer. It comes from the idea of bringing your goods to a central meeting place, the “market", where the goods can be displayed, and interest can be generated.

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