Automotive marketing does not suffer from a shortage of data. It suffers from a shortage of coordinated decisions. OEM teams measure national media, dealers measure leads and showroom activity, agencies optimize platforms, and co-op administrators verify claims. Each function can perform its task correctly while the network as a whole spends twice, learns slowly and sends the customer mixed signals.
Boston Consulting Group’s 2025 article, “Shifting Gears to Accelerate Automotive Marketing ROI,” places a number on the opportunity. BCG argues that a modern marketing approach can improve return on investment by 20% to 40%.[1] The range is compelling, but the diagnosis behind it is more useful than the headline.
BCG finds that more than half of the senior automotive marketers it surveyed believe their capabilities are not designed for today’s fragmented customer journey. Only 30% believe they have adequate analytics resources for effective decisions, and only 30% believe they can measure the incremental impact of marketing activities. At the same time, just one-quarter of automakers regularly coordinate marketing with their dealer networks.[1]
That last figure deserves more attention. If dealers remain a decisive part of the purchase journey but only one in four automakers coordinates with them regularly, then a substantial part of the ROI problem sits between organizations. Better modeling at headquarters cannot fix a local execution system that plans, buys and learns separately.
The Customer Journey Changed Faster Than the Operating Model
BCG contrasts the old buying journey—television, billboards, product reviews and a dealer visit—with a path that can now begin with an influencer, continue through streaming media and a virtual showroom, and end with little or no traditional showroom contact. Electric vehicles add another layer because messages about charging, range and ownership need to address different customer concerns.
Yet many automotive organizations still plan in long cycles and deploy broad campaigns across markets with very different demand, inventory and retail capability. The media may be digital, but the operating rhythm remains largely analog.
This mismatch creates familiar symptoms. National and local teams bid on the same keywords. Dealers receive assets after the local opportunity has moved. Incentives are promoted without enough inventory context. Campaign performance is reviewed after budgets are committed. Data is available, but not in a form that changes the next decision.
“Measurement insights are valuable only if automakers can act on them.” Boston Consulting Group, Shifting Gears to Accelerate Automotive Marketing ROI
That sentence is the center of the argument. Measurement and operating design cannot be separated. An organization that improves analytics without changing ownership, cadence and decision rights produces better explanations of yesterday.
The missing layer is network orchestration.
Automotive marketing is delivered through an ecosystem, but it is often managed as a collection of contracts and departments. The opportunity is to connect OEM strategy, co-op economics, dealer execution, shared evidence and learning in one operating cycle.
Measurement Must Follow the Journey
BCG recommends an integrated measurement framework with different indicators for awareness, consideration and conversion. This is important because the final sale is not the only useful signal, and early-funnel activity should not be judged as if it were a lower-funnel campaign.
At the awareness stage, marketers need evidence of brand strength and relevance within a customer need. During consideration, website interaction, leads and scheduled test drives show whether interest is becoming action. At conversion, sales matter—but total sales alone cannot isolate the effect of a campaign. The real objective is to estimate incremental sales: purchases that were more likely to occur because of the marketing.
| Journey stage | Useful evidence | Cooperative question |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Brand strength, mind share, paid reach, sponsorship response and audience-specific perception. | Are OEM and dealer messages building the same market position? |
| Consideration | Vehicle-page engagement, search behavior, leads, calls, configurations and test drives. | Are national and local investments moving customers toward an available vehicle? |
| Conversion | Matched sales, order activity, gross contribution, inventory turn and modeled incrementality. | Did the combined investment influence an outcome beyond expected demand? |
| Program economics | Eligible spend, reimbursement, claim acceptance, net dealer cost and unused funds. | Did the network convert available funding into compliant, productive activity? |
| Learning | Test results by market, audience, creative, model, offer, vendor and retailer capability. | What should change in the next allocation and in the next program rule? |
No single tool can answer all five questions. BCG notes that media mix modeling is useful for historical channel allocation but is usually too aggregated to isolate individual creative formats. In-market experimentation can add a more direct view of incremental impact. Brand measures can detect changes that sales data will reveal only later.[2] Matched customer outcomes can connect media and retail activity, but a match alone does not prove causality.
A cooperative ecosystem can make this portfolio of evidence more practical. It creates a shared definition of the funnel, assigns each metric to the decision it supports and gives OEM and dealer teams a common place to compare results without pretending that every signal has the same strength.
Why Dealer Collaboration Is the Largest Immediate Opportunity
BCG reports that only one-quarter of automakers regularly coordinate marketing with their dealers. The firm links this gap to duplicative spending, inconsistent messaging and situations in which OEMs and dealers bid against each other for the same media.[1]
Those problems are not abstract. A national campaign can increase interest in a model that is scarce locally. A dealer can buy a search term already covered by the OEM. Two agencies can retarget the same shopper with different offers. A co-op rule can reward an approved tactic even when the local market needs something else.
The dealer network is also where strategy encounters reality. Inventory, lead handling, test-drive capacity, local competition and staff follow-up determine whether demand becomes a sale. Excluding that context from planning weakens both measurement and execution.
| Benefit | How value is created | Practical outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Lower media duplication | OEM and dealer plans share geography, audiences, keywords, timing and investment visibility. | Less internal bidding competition and clearer channel roles. |
| Stronger local relevance | National brand strategy is combined with local demand, inventory and retail insight. | Messages and offers fit the market without fragmenting the brand. |
| Faster campaign adaptation | Common performance signals and decision rights shorten the path from evidence to action. | Budgets, creative and targeting change while the opportunity is still active. |
| Better use of co-op funds | Eligibility and performance are considered before spend rather than reconciled afterward. | Higher productive utilization and fewer preventable claim failures. |
| Reusable network learning | Local tests are recorded in a standard format and compared across similar markets. | A good dealer experiment can improve the next campaign across the network. |
| Privacy-aware collaboration | Shared insight is separated from uncontrolled exchange of customer-level data. | Useful audience and outcome analysis with clearer governance. |
BCG points to data clean rooms as one way to enable secure consumer insight collaboration without directly exchanging raw data.[1] Clean rooms can be valuable, but they are not the operating model. They solve part of the data-access problem. The organization still needs shared questions, permissions, quality rules and people authorized to act on the findings.
Co-op Funding Should Become Performance Capital
Traditional co-op programs are often administered as reimbursement systems. They define eligible media, approved vendors, documentation and claim windows. These controls are necessary, but they do not answer whether the activity created incremental value.
A modern cooperative ecosystem treats funds as performance capital. The OEM contributes resources and brand direction. The dealer contributes local knowledge, execution and often matching investment. Both parties receive evidence that should improve the next decision.
This changes the purpose of the program. The goal is no longer to maximize claims alone. It is to allocate shared investment toward the markets, audiences and activities with a credible path to business impact—while preserving brand, financial and data controls.
| Traditional program | Cooperative performance ecosystem |
|---|---|
| Measures funds used and claims paid. | Measures utilization, net cost, execution quality and business contribution. |
| Checks compliance after media runs. | Builds eligibility and evidence requirements into campaign planning. |
| Treats approved vendors as a sufficient quality signal. | Separates vendor eligibility from ongoing performance evaluation. |
| Distributes standard assets broadly. | Preserves the brand system while adapting message, inventory and offer to local demand. |
| Stores results by campaign or claim. | Builds a reusable learning base across markets, retailers and program cycles. |
| Reviews performance after the funding period. | Uses a recurring test-and-adjust cadence while funds can still be reallocated. |
Reimbursement is a financial event. Cooperation is a learning system.
A claim tells the organization that an activity followed the rules. A cooperative ecosystem should also reveal whether the activity reached the intended market, moved a meaningful customer signal and deserves another dollar.
How AIM-COM™ Can Optimize the System
AIM-COM™ is designed for the gap between strategy and local execution. It does not replace an OEM’s media platform, customer data infrastructure or claim portal. It provides the operating method that connects them: common definitions, decision rights, fund economics, execution workflows and learning.
The methodology organizes cooperative marketing around six connected disciplines. Each responds directly to a weakness identified in BCG’s analysis.
| AIM-COM™ discipline | BCG gap addressed | Optimization contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy | One-size-fits-all campaigns in a fragmented buying journey. | Defines the customer, market, vehicle, objective and intended outcome before funding is allocated. |
| Co-op economics | Duplicative investment and weak visibility into true return. | Connects gross spend, OEM share, dealer share, reimbursement and expected business value. |
| Governance | Cross-company data, brand and accountability gaps. | Clarifies eligibility, approvals, data purpose, evidence, ownership and exceptions. |
| Enablement | Uneven skills and limited capacity across the network. | Gives dealers practical playbooks, templates, training and support matched to their maturity. |
| Activation | Slow execution and disconnected national and local media. | Coordinates campaign timing, audience, inventory, creative, vendor and retailer responsibilities. |
| Intelligence | Analytics that explain performance but do not change decisions. | Combines funnel, financial and operational evidence and returns the learning to allocation and rules. |
The value comes from the connections. Strategy without fund visibility creates plans that dealers cannot execute. Governance without enablement creates rules that are technically correct and commercially ignored. Measurement without a decision cadence creates dashboards. AIM-COM™ treats those dependencies as one system.
One vocabulary across OEM, agency and dealer teams
The first optimization is semantic. “Lead,” “engagement,” “incremental sale,” “eligible spend” and “local market” need stable definitions. When each partner calculates the same term differently, performance reviews become negotiations over data rather than decisions about investment.
One economic view from gross spend to net contribution
Co-op reporting should show the full cost of the activity, the amount eligible for reimbursement, the approved amount, the dealer’s net cost and the associated commercial result. This prevents a high reimbursement rate from making an ineffective campaign look efficient.
One learning cycle across markets
A successful dealer test should not remain a local anecdote. AIM-COM™ can standardize the hypothesis, audience, investment, execution conditions and result so the network can judge where the learning transfers—and where local differences make it unsuitable.
A Practical Operating Cycle
BCG argues for speed, collaboration and agility. In a cooperative environment, those qualities need a repeatable cadence rather than an occasional transformation project.
AI Can Accelerate the Ecosystem—If Governance Keeps Up
BCG highlights generative AI as a way to produce localized text, images and video faster, while predictive approaches can improve audience selection and budget allocation. The opportunity is particularly relevant to dealer networks, where central teams need to support many local variations without rebuilding every campaign from scratch.
In a cooperative ecosystem, AI can help adapt approved creative to a local market, translate or dub content, summarize performance anomalies, check documentation and recommend budget scenarios. It can also reduce the administrative burden that causes dealers to leave funds unused.
But BCG is explicit that these technologies are not plug and play and that humans must remain in the loop.[1] Brand protection, legal review, data permissions and local truth still require accountable owners. A generated offer that does not match inventory, or a localized claim that violates program rules, is not faster marketing. It is faster rework.
How to Measure Whether the Ecosystem Is Working
The BCG opportunity range should not become a target pasted onto every program. A credible baseline is required. The organization also needs to distinguish between efficiency gains, commercial lift and administrative improvement.
| Dimension | Example measures | What improvement means |
|---|---|---|
| Investment efficiency | Duplicated audience spend, keyword overlap, cost per qualified action and net media cost. | The network buys less redundant reach and directs more budget to productive demand. |
| Commercial impact | Incremental leads, test drives, orders, sales, gross contribution and inventory turn. | Marketing changes outcomes rather than only recording activity. |
| Program health | Productive fund utilization, claim acceptance, unused balances and reimbursement cycle time. | More available funding becomes compliant, measurable activation. |
| Execution quality | Launch cycle time, asset adoption, lead response and retailer participation. | Insight reaches the market faster and the store can convert the demand. |
| Learning velocity | Tests completed, decisions changed, findings reused and rules updated. | The ecosystem improves with each campaign rather than restarting from zero. |
A 20% to 40% improvement may come from several sources: lower duplication, better channel allocation, faster creative adaptation, stronger local conversion or more productive use of co-op funds. The contribution of each source should be measured separately. Otherwise, a favorable sales period can be mistaken for proof that the new operating model caused the result.
The Bottom Line
BCG’s research makes a persuasive case for modernizing automotive marketing measurement and operations. The industry needs better analytics, cross-functional talent, faster execution and thoughtful use of AI. But its dealer coordination finding exposes the practical constraint: automakers cannot optimize a distributed customer journey from the center alone.
A cooperative marketing ecosystem gives OEMs and dealers a shared way to plan, fund, execute and learn. It reduces avoidable competition inside the network. It makes local context visible. It links reimbursement to performance without weakening compliance. Most importantly, it turns measurement into a decision that someone is expected to make.
The return does not improve because the organization knows more. It improves when the OEM and dealer network can act on the same evidence before the opportunity moves.
AIM-COM™ can optimize that operating layer: the point where brand strategy, co-op economics, governance, local execution and performance intelligence become one coordinated system.
References
- Boston Consulting Group — “Shifting Gears to Accelerate Automotive Marketing ROI”, January 8, 2025.
- Boston Consulting Group — “Capturing Mind Share with Precision Branding”, September 19, 2023.
Turn OEM–dealer coordination into measurable marketing value.
AIM-COM™ connects strategy, co-op economics, governance, dealer enablement, activation and intelligence so the network can reduce duplication, move faster and invest with greater confidence.
Discuss a Cooperative Marketing ROI Diagnostic