Episode 12 – Brandon Price, Digital Marketing Director at Cavender Auto Family

🎙 Episode 12 — Brandon Price, Digital Marketing Director at Cavender Auto Family

In this episode of 100 Marketers, we sit down with Brandon Price, Digital Marketing Director for the Cavender Auto Family, to unpack how he scaled marketing across twelve brands and seventeen rooftops. Brandon shares his journey from selling cars and working the service drive to leading a fourteen-person in-house marketing team that functions like a full-service agency.

Listeners will learn how Cavender Auto approaches dealership acquisitions, integrates new stores into the family, balances branding and lead generation, and innovates vehicle acquisition directly from service drives. Brandon also dives into using AI in marketing and sales, creating engaging social media content, recruiting top talent, and maintaining compliance while driving results.

This episode is packed with actionable insights for automotive marketers, dealership leaders, and anyone looking to grow their business through smarter marketing and operational strategies.

Key Topics Covered

1. Brandon’s Career Journey – From dealership sales and service to leading a multi-store marketing team.
2. Scaling Marketing Teams – Building an in-house team of 14 across media buying, creative, social, and digital strategy.
3. Acquisition Playbooks – How Cavender Auto integrates new dealerships efficiently while respecting local markets and OEM requirements.
4. Balancing Branding vs. Lead Generation – Strategies for established markets vs. newly acquired stores.
5. Vehicle Acquisition from Service Drives – Processes, forms, incentives, and proactive outreach to acquire inventory.
6. AI in Marketing and Sales – Using AI tools for CRM follow-ups, website chat, equity mining, and service campaigns.
7. Social Media Strategy – Leveraging organic content and human experiences to drive engagement, recruitment, and community connection.
8. Recruiting Top Talent – How authentic marketing content attracts employees and strengthens workplace culture.
9. Adapting to Market Nuances – Customizing campaigns for different OEMs, communities, and customer behaviors.
10. Looking Ahead – Plans for testing AI, experimenting with software platforms, and refining marketing fundamentals in 2026.

Like what you hear?

Subscribe and follow along as we talk with more brilliant marketing minds shaping the future of automotive retail. 

Think you got what it takes to be a guest? 

Contact Ashley: ashley@dealeromg.com and lets get your opinion out into the world!

Transcript

We are on a mission to talk to the 100 leading marketing minds in the automotive space. I'm Andrew Street, owner of Dealer OMG. Matthew Davis here, chief marketing officer at Trade Pending. Why are we doing this? Well, we like automotive.

We like marketers, and we like retail automotive marketers. Our goal here is to give you the insights into what these leading marketers are thinking, planning, and doing.

How does a single point Toyota dealership grow to seven hundred vehicles acquired each month with their marketing and their service departments? Now join me on this episode of the hundred marketers project. I'm joined here with Brandon Price, the marketing director of the Cavender Auto family. One of my favorite auto groups by far in the nation. While he talks about growing his marketing team from just him to fourteen people while they acquired a handful of stores and have, I think, seventeen stores now.  Enjoy this conversation and like and subscribe and review and whatever you can do to help out.

So you want to tell us just who you are, a little bit about your background and what you do. Well, Brandon Price, I have been with the Cavender Auto family for twenty years. About twelve years ago, I was promoted to the Digital Marketing Director role. Started with handling just one store, then had a second, and then we decided to go ahead and buy everything so uh i've now got uh uh twelve brands under seventeen rooftops uh in a fairly short amount of time uh but the last four years so it's uh it's grown pretty quickly what's that felt like It's been a ride, that's for sure. It has definitely been a ride. It has been like drinking from the fire hydrant, you know, for quite a while. But getting things situated, taken care of, obviously growing pains. We have dramatically increased our capacity on the marketing side, where quite literally it was myself and one other individual. And now we've got a team with about fourteen people. oh okay that's big yeah so uh anything from uh media buying to uh digital uh you know graphic design uh to social media content creation um all sorts of all sorts of facets so that's totally different it's kind of like going doing what i've done like going from fine tuning things for one dealership to all of a sudden growing an ad agency, which is a completely different ball game. Yeah. Yeah. It almost feels like you're running your own in-house agency there. Is that a fair analogy or do you think about it in a different way? That's effectively what we've done. We've, uh, uh, we've actually cut ties with, uh, advertising agencies that we were using in the past and we brought things in house. Uh, so we've been able to, uh, been able to go ahead and turn things out a lot quicker. We're able to go ahead and pivot a lot quicker. And when things come up just out of the blue, we're able to go ahead and act on them and get things turned out for the different stores. So it worked out well. Did you start in marketing? Started selling cars. I've done a little bit of everything around the dealership from selling cars to... I mean, I've turned wrenches before. I've done a little bit in parts. Know enough about finance and sales desk to be dangerous as well. So I've done a little bit of everything around the dealership. yeah it's uh i had brandon get on a stage with me at digital dealer before in a panel and talk about what makes a good marketing director because they're completely different types like some people are really into the oversight of vendors and execution and reporting some are into the creative side some are just familiar with how a dealership works and brandon kind of comes with just like the dealership chops then they kind of got a front row education and how marketing works for the dealership and kind of getting all all the stuff executed lined up. And and so like As you guys are onboarding new stores, have you sort of come up with a playbook that's been working well for you guys to have a checklist of what all the things that you guys need to get done is? We do actually. And it's with our latest acquisitions that we've done, it's worked out quite well. We effectively assemble our team together that has responsibilities in all different areas. coming into the acquisition, we're meeting usually once every couple of weeks. Right up to acquisition, we're sometimes meeting almost every day, just to make sure everyone's got different things covered. So that way, once we do go ahead and close, once we go ahead and our dealer code is issued to us, we can activate everything where we need to, websites to inventory to then starting to get advertising rolling and try to make that shift from the previous ownership to us as quick as possible. You make it sound easy. I mean, make it look easy too, but there's a few other things going on behind the curtain there. Yeah. It's like, I don't know what our marketing department does, but it's smooth. It's already live. There we go. So how do you when you're going through all these acquisitions, how do you think about folding them into the Cavender family? Is it mostly from like a branding perspective? Are we going to keep the company name? Are we going to change it? How are we going to message that to the community and to the market? A lot of the DBA is negotiated with the OEMs, whenever we're looking at the acquisition. Most of our stores have the Kavner name on them. Some have competence and some begin with the OEM name. We have two Audi stores, both of them are Audi, wherever they're at, right? Lubbock, Dominion, et cetera. Same thing with BMW. But a lot of the OEMs allow us to go ahead and put our name on there. So we've been able to go ahead and do that. We've got a couple of stores that go under the name Confidence. And that has been a tagline for the calendar family for several decades now. And we've just, you know, our owners said, you know what? Always wanted to name a dealership Confidence. So we've got a couple of them now. got a really tactical question andrew that i want to ask brandon and then i'll stop asking questions for a little bit here when you acquire those stores are you able to absorb that marketing budget and essentially it's additive so now i've got more money to play with or are you trying to or being asked to essentially like get some efficiencies there some some scale or is it a combo of both A little bit of both. There's some things that we will carry over from what previous ownership was doing. A lot of what we will end up doing though is take several of the formulas in winning stores that we have that are winning and go ahead and implement those into, into our newer stores. Um, we, we have found that sometimes most cases that typically works, some markets respond better to certain tactics than others. And so we've had to modify just a little bit as we go through that. Um, but, uh, as we put our business plan together and, And the type of business that we're going to do in sales, the type of business we're going to do in fixed ops, we go ahead and assign a budget to that based off of our pro forma and what we're going to end up doing. And so then we go ahead and just kind of back into the budget that way. In a lot of cases, when we first go ahead and acquire a store, we're going to pump a little bit more into it just to first off, get our name out there. Secondly, especially in markets where the Cavender name may not be as well known, we'll put a little bit more into the branding side of things to go ahead and start to get our name in front of people as opposed to the previous ownership. you found much success like with getting the name out there when you switch your name to getting in front of that existing customer base that the previous owner the previous store's name had we've we've had some successes and challenges a couple of the stores that we acquired the previous ownership of the store was not as well regarded by the public and by their customers. So in a lot of cases we've had, you know, customers say, oh, thank goodness y'all bought this thing because we hated going there with the previous ownership. Um, you know, in, in others, uh, we acquired stores that were, uh, under some very, very well-established names, um, from, from ownership. And so there's been a little bit of resistance to change, if you will, from the, from the, from the owner base. Um, you know, some are, you know, kind of set in their ways and they're like, well, I wish you did things like they did or. you know, well, you know, Those people have been part of the community. You people are new and just came in. We don't even know who you are. So that's where we have to take the time to build strategies around introducing people to who we are, whether it be through advertising mediums, whether it be through social mediums, whether it be through literally having events at the dealership to introduce people to who we are. And so we've had to work through different scenarios, again, different markets and different ownership. That's interesting. It's like, as you get new stores, it's sort of like different personalities of a store that you're going to acquire. It's like, okay, this one is a personality B. They have a bad reputation. So new name, good news community. We're an integral part of your community. New ownership, new everything. We're here to, you know, entrench ourselves in the neighboring communities, employ the neighborhood and do, you know, great deals with you guys and services and let's go after everybody driving our brand versus these people have a great reputation. So same great staff, same great team, same part of the community versus a turnaround strategy, it sounds like. Yeah, it's been interesting, that's for sure. Brandon, how do you think about this kind of top level You're overseeing fourteen people and just a lot of things going on. How do you think about balancing brand awareness and getting the name out versus my people just want leads so they can sell cars right now? There's definitely a balance on that. In the markets where we been established for several years, we don't have to put as much emphasis on the branding portion of it. And so we can go ahead and focus a little bit more on the lead generation piece of it, right? In the markets where our name was not even thought of, we've really had to learn how to kind of adapt our strategies to building our brand awareness in addition to driving, you know, driving the leads because, you know, as sales and service, both, you know, are looking for, well, we want more opportunities. We want more opportunities to go ahead and do business. You know, we want to, especially on the sales side, we want to sell more cars. We want more leads. And, But we also need to introduce people to, again, who we are. And that's where we, again, with our latest acquisitions, we've had to make sure we cut some budget out for the branding situation to go ahead and make sure people do understand who we are. But I mean, realistically, to address your question, there's no one answer for it. It just kind of depends on the situation. and with like the a lot of the new stores you guys have so matthew and brandon you both have a similar bond or a similar interest in vehicle acquisition off the streets that is betrayed and brandon has kind of hit him in the toyota story where he works out of have like written the book on how to do vehicle acquisition through the service department and through the marketing department correct me if I'm wrong on any of that brand, but they do something like seven hundred cars a month in trades. That's a lot. Have you been able to get that established at any other stores really in any capacity? So yeah. So going into going into shortage, we knew that, you know, we knew that we were looking at two or three months away and we were going to be we were going to be hurt because we weren't going to be getting cars. So we knew we had to figure out a way to be able to acquire vehicles. And the biggest acquisition piece was right on the other side of the dealership, which was a service drive. And so then we developed processes, we developed putting the people in the right places to be able to go ahead and get customers interested in parting with their vehicle And in addition, giving them the great idea that they can get a great deal on a new car as well. But as far as what we're purchasing right off the service drive, there's probably not a single day that goes by that we're not buying something just outright right off the service drive. But in most cases, it's also, it has helped to be able to go ahead and be a sales driver. So not only are we acquiring the inventory for the used car department, we're also then selling a new car at the same time and working in conjunction with the service department If they have a bill that's over there or if they have a big estimate that's over there, we're still going to go ahead and obviously take the car in on trade and we're going to fix it. And we're going to go ahead and make sure the service department gets paid as well. We don't want to take money out of their pocket either. yeah we hear that sometimes there's that friction like hey you're taking money away from me that's good to hear you guys have figured that out what are some of the kind of the basic tactics you guys are doing to source from the service drive you like you got banners in there are you printing out a evaluation with every order or you have a separate staff that's responsible for that or is it the sales people coming in what are some of those key little i don't know orchestrated elements that you do to pull this off We developed our own in-house form that gets printed out. We have individuals on the service drive who are scanning. Mornings are typically the busiest, right? We have to line out to the street of people who are waiting to get in. But, you know, we've got individuals on the service drive. They'll scan the bins, pop the miles in. punch it in, what have you. We've got a general appraiser who is then assigning values to all the vehicles, and they'll go ahead and get printed out on the sheet, which goes with the customer's RO, and it shows how much we'll buy the car for today. It shows how much... And depending on what state you're in, you may have tax credits on trading. Also shows how much money they would save on taxes on trading it for a new vehicle. And then if they did sell it to us today, we would pay for their service bill. And so there's a few different hooks that are on there, if you will. But in addition to just doing that and just the receptionist handing them their paperwork when they're done and they have this buying sheet, we actually also have our team, our sales team, proactively reaching out to those customers to say, hey, just want to let you know, did you get your sheet? if they're still here and they say, hey, we went ahead and we want to purchase your vehicle from you and then let them have the idea that, oh, well, I need something to drive. Great, come on over. And so we're being very proactive on making sure that anyone that we're assigning a value to is getting a phone call, including myself. I've been called several times from having my vehicle in service. thought you were picking up the phone and calling but you're actually the one getting the call that's it i was the one getting the call that's ghost shopping yeah almost do you trade in your car every time they call you what's that do you trade in your vehicle after they call you like okay i guess Um, you know, it's, it's provided some, uh, some good opportunities on a couple of those calls to, uh, have a salesperson come over and let's, uh, let's coach up a little bit on some of your verbiage. They see it too. And they're like, damn it. Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah, especially, especially when I say, Hey, where are you physically located at the dealership right now? So, OK, let me come see you. So they're like, oh, great. What do I do now? It's always a good conversation. Always a good conversation. Always willing to help a salesperson who might be able to do something a little bit better to be able to serve their customer better, serve themselves better and serve the dealership better. It's a good byproduct of driving the dealerships vehicles too. You fall into some other, the mouse traps that you don't just do by filling out the lead forms on the website. Oh, this is very tough. You have to make sure they work. Give us a sense of, so in terms of just acquiring used vehicles from the public, do you have a dedicated outbound team for this? Are you running campaigns across social media, wherever? You know, purchasing from the public, um, We had been initially running some social campaigns to go ahead and try to drive some of that. Where the market has now re-evolved back into, we're not so much running campaigns to go ahead and specifically acquire vehicles from the public. Do we have some signage up on one of our buildings? Absolutely. A lot of what we end up doing is, especially as we're working some of our equity mining tools, part of the verbiage that we put into place is, you know, obviously trade up. But if it's like, no, I'm not willing to trade up, great. Would you be willing to allow us to buy your vehicle back from you? I mean, just straight up, just buy it back from you and leave it at that. And we've had a few people that have said, you know what? Yeah, actually, I will sell it. Has anyone ever traded down? Is that a thing? Maybe we could test that, Andrew. Some people do trade down. In fact, actually, a really good friend of mine has someone they're acquainted with at work who wanted to literally trade down. had a large truck, wanted to trade down into a small SUV. I said, well, come on, come see me. Let's go. And so we went ahead and took care of it. Simplifying. I've been around a number of marketing meetings with leadership teams at dealerships, and it's hard to go too far without them bringing up AI and like, what are we doing with AI? It was in our training group. Do you guys have much of a focus with AI in any capacity at the marketing end? We've been working with a few different forms of the AI tools for a little over a year now, whether it be on the sales side or the service side or even the marketing side of things. with on the sales side, integrating that AI tool into our CRM to assist our internet people with follow up. It's also consequently helped a lot of our OEM metrics with response time as well. So added bonus there. But yes, but we've been using it in that aspect. With some of our stores, we also have implemented chat on the website using an AI tool. On the service side of things, we have used it in campaigns for contacting customers who are on the bubble of us losing them. They haven't been in so long that We're about to get Dingle and OEM metric, right? You know, there's several different service campaigns that are out there that we can go ahead and reach out to our customers to as well. From the marketing side of things, linking in with our... equity mining pieces to go ahead and start to reach out to customers through an AI piece to go ahead and try to generate some interest or at least getting clicks into the website, getting people looking at, you know, shopping for inventory and then we can go ahead and say, okay, well, now let's go ahead and have our salespeople reach out to these customers and just say, hey, I'm just doing a follow-up with you. It looks like you hadn't been in in a little while and just want to make sure things are going well, et cetera, et cetera. And they're like, oh, I saw a shopper for a car. Got to work on the verbiage, though. Can't say, hey, I saw you were on the website. You opened this email. That's my favorite. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. When you forwarded it, too, it looks like. Yeah. Exactly. All of that stuff is not not marketing. It seems like all the outreach to service customers and stuff, does that fall on marketing's desk to see how it's performing? to a point, but also have to work very closely with the service leadership team. We've gotta be careful on some of the messages that we can put out there, depending on OEM. There's a lot of little Tricks and things of that nature. Not so much tricks. You've got to keep everybody happy. You've got to keep everyone happy. And you've got to make sure to stay compliant. That's one of the biggest things is making sure you stay compliant. Is handcuffs too strong a word? It's, you know, it might be. Your wrist slap. I don't put anybody in a corner here. Okay. Well, what else is cool that's working well for you guys right now? You know, a lot of the things that are working well for us are just fundamentals, just basic blocking and tackling. The fundamentals is what will really, you know, sustain us and what have you. Yes, we can look for all of the next generation systems and, you know, the piece of the AI that will go ahead and do this for you and, you know, some of the AI tools that are out there, the phone handling, things of that nature, right? We can look at a lot of these different tools that are out there to be able to use, but if we're not doing the very basics, which is still the human interaction, which is still what people want, then we're not gonna win. And so that's where we still continue to put a lot of focus between variable operations, fixed operations, is making sure that we are adhering to our basics and making sure that we're serving our customers. And on like the, just with like social media right now, with your team going out there, it sounds like you got boots on the ground at the stores shooting some content. What do you feel like is working well, whether it's paid or organic? On the organic side, we're seeing a lot more of an uptick in engagement with not so much shooting content that, hey, here's this car. It's on special. It's got a low price. It's actually been more of our team. It's been how our team's interacting. It's been what we're doing around the dealership. And it's those personal experiences that I think a lot of people are... coming out of the COVID ether. And they're like, you know what? I've sequestered myself long enough. I want to see more of those human experiences. And they want to get out from behind the screen and go, you know what? This place is pretty cool because they're doing this and this and this. I want to go experience that. And so we're seeing a lot more engagement with that and a lot more positivity off of it. Yeah. Sometimes the car can be the story, but the real story is always the people. Like that's what people latch onto in general. And who are these people as humans? What do they do? Who are they? Can they entertain me? And by the way, here's a car for sale. Exactly. Well, and not only that, but it also, uh, it also will go ahead and introduce our team to them. So, you know, again, if we have, we have a general manager who, you know, participates in a lot of our content. And people come to the store, they're like, hey, I saw this guy. I saw the video on him. And so it makes a much more personal connection. And, you know, again, as we're finding more and more people are wanting to see that connection and go experience it, it's working well for us. Yeah, I think Andrew lives that every day whenever he goes to any kind of conference. Everybody sees him on video all the time. They're like, that's the guy. There he is. Yeah, there he is. That's more you than me. I sit pretty far away from my camera. You're right in the camera. That's true. I'm way closer. Yeah. Zoom out. Real estate. Yeah. I feel like when you have that, like, that, you know, that vibe, that's that. lack of reluctance to start shooting content inside the dealership and the vehicle trade-ins and all the interesting stuff that people don't really see. The employees like to see that stuff too. And their other, you know, the co-workers getting on there and then their friends see it and their friends and family and starts to kind of build a cool community where I like to think about sort of work culture and a tool for recruiting people as well as getting customers just to see the pulse of a dealership outside of we're number one certified pre-owned vehicles two months in a row and well you you actually hit on something uh andrew is from the recruiting side of it too we actually have people who want to come to work for us because they they see they have seen on social who we are and and they and want to be a part of it right i mean they want to be a Everyone wants to go work for the best workplace, right? And so when they start to see that, it's like, oh, okay, that's, yeah, I think I want to go work there. So we've gained quite a few of our team members, whether it be from variable or fixed, simply because of some of the social media content we're putting out there. That's amazing. And do you feel like they're more engaged or invested in being successful there as a result of that? I think so. People want to be part of something that's bigger than they are, and they want to try to be an important part to it. And if they can enjoy doing that and enjoy the people that they work with, that just makes for a great workplace. And that's what we want to provide to our entire team is we want to provide just that. Yeah. So we are around in the back corner of the year. What are you looking forward to in twenty twenty six in areas that you might be experimenting with? AI everything? AI everything. I'm just kidding. You know, AI is a piece of it, yes. Now that we've been in the AI space for over a year, we have determined some areas that are working well. We determined some areas that we could have some opportunity. We're starting to kind of A-B test with some different software platforms to be able to go ahead and find a right mix for the market that the stores are in. And in some cases, customers of one OEM respond better to a to a particular software and how it operates, then customers have a different idea. That's fascinating. Yeah. We've we've we've discovered that there's because there's no one perfect tool that's out there and they don't all work for everything. And so we've been able to kind of figure out, all right, this works over here for for this for this crowd and these types of shoppers and people who are servicing their vehicles. But it doesn't work for this model over here, this OEM. Yeah, there's a lot of variables. It's rural, it's more urban, it's different manufacturers. Have you guys found any way to help get applications for service techs? We actually are working with a partner that is specific in the technician space. One of the biggest things that we have found is as we go ahead and bring technicians on, their circle of influence is pretty tight. And when we bring them on and they see how well we operate, a lot of times they bring their friends. I'll give you a perfect example. One of our stores hired a gentleman from Puerto Rico to become a technician, be a technician in the shop, relocated from Puerto Rico. Loved it so much and saw how we operate and has never worked in a situation like that before. I had five of his friends go ahead and join us as well. So we got six technicians from hiring one. That's amazing. Yeah. Andrew, this reminds me of who we were talking to, Scott. And he's talking about the Vietnamese niche angle they were taking with the advertising there. This is right up that alley. You find one community and you do what you do. You do right. And it just builds. Yeah. you get into that little dugout and then it spreads across all the players in their little dugout. And it's like, okay, great. Like, that's why I've learned like with the social advertising too, especially with recruiting, it's like, do you know somebody looking to the level of their career, you know, sign up bonus, air conditioned bays, all the things that we could possibly put out there. Well, to see it shared with a lot of folks sometimes I'm like, okay, cool. That might not be the right person, but they're plugged in with the right person. For the right community. Well, Brandon, man, I cannot thank you enough for taking a little time out of your Saturday to jump on because I know that it's been amazing to see you grow this footprint with dealerships and your role from just you and a graphic designer to where you guys are now, man. And it's cool. I like the transparency of sharing your story. And I know people, is there anywhere online that people can follow you? Um, you know, I, I keep a pretty low profile. Uh, we'll just, we'll just say that, uh, I'm kind of the antithesis of, uh, anyone in marketing that has every social media platform that they could be on. Um, but, uh, probably coming soon, probably coming soon. Okay. Yeah. Let me know what I can do to help from my desk, my friend. Thank you, Brandon.

Hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you did, please subscribe to the show. It helps us get out to more people like you.

And if you know somebody or you're somebody that's a sharp marketer in automotive, please reach out to us. We'd love to feature you on the show. Reach out to Ashley at Dealer o m g dot com.