Coming Out of the Shadows

The idea is to position the dealer as an advocate for customers who is looking after their needs. That will bring more business—and more repeat business—than slashing prices will, Nelson says. No more fire sales to get one-time buyers onto the lot. That’s a losing tactic. Deeply discounted vehicles with no upgrades give dealers an infinitesimally small return. Nelson cites industry research showing that a repeat customer will spend $800 more on a vehicle than a dealer’s first-time buyers will, and that less than 15 percent of first-time buyers will ever return—at least if dealers use traditional marketing.

“Whereas, we can prove that if dealers consistently do right by their customers, they will create a relationship that translates into far greater profitability,” Nelson says. Visible Customer claims to increase the profitability of many of its dealer-customers within a few months of enrolling them, saying that some have had a 5 to 6 percent increase in gross profit margins on new-car sales and a 10 percent increase in gross margin on service sales.

That’s without cheap oil-change deals to bring people in and then pitch a tire rotation to them, and without warranty offers sent to a dealer’s entire list of customers, whether or not their warranty is up.

“Very deeply ingrained in our values at Visible Customer is that we will never send a message to a customer that’s irrelevant,” Nelson says. If customers choose to take advantage of an offer—an extended warranty, a new car purchased on trade-in, a vehicle check-up—he wants them to go away feeling it was a good deal. He adds, “Our goal is to look after the customer in the life cycle of their automobile and purchase.”

If all this sounds familiar—say, like the original Saturn message—that’s because it is. Nelson worked on Saturn’s immensely successful “Different Kind of Car Company” campaign back in the ’90s, when he was an executive at Carlson Marketing. But that was a different time for Nelson, a nearly different life.

His name sounds so common that you might not recognize at first who Curtis Nelson is. You’ve read about him many times before.

Nelson is the eponymous grandson of Curtis Carlson, that legendary Minneapolis businessman who used $55 of borrowed capital to start the Gold Bond Stamp Company, which became the Minnetonka-based Carlson Companies, one of the largest family-held corporations in the United States, with businesses in travel, hospitality, and marketing.

Born in 1964 to Marilyn Carlson Nelson (former CEO and now board chair at Carlson) and her husband, Dr. Glen Nelson (once vice chair at Medtronic), Curt Nelson first made news as a teenager. It was 1980. He was driving home from a dance at the Blake School—upset because he’d just broken up with a girlfriend—when he crashed his parents’ car and was thrown out of the vehicle, then smashed by it as it rolled. His lungs were crushed, his liver perforated. He should have died.