Brett David has made nearly $2 million by selling cars through Instagram in the first half of this year alone.
That figure refers to sales sparked directly by specific Instagram posts, the 30-year-old owner of Prestige Imports said this week in Miami. That’s not to mention sales that may have been inspired by an Instagram post at first but took some time to percolate before finalizing.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how important Instagram is to these guys—it’s scary,” said David, who says he has sold $1 billion worth of Lamborghini cars since 2007. He met his biggest customer, Kris Singh, on Instagram; the collector, who boasts more than 681,000 followers, reached out to David about a Lamborghini Reventon, ended up buying a Pagani, and has since bought many more six- and seven-figure cars from the dealer as well.
David is in the middle of promoting the soft opening of his new $17 million dealership, which is equipped with a green room and video production team primed specifically to allow clients to make Instagram-worthy photos and clips their million-dollar toys. For him the room, which cost $140,000 to build, is an essential tool in staying relevant: “You have to know how to connect not through creating customers, but through creating fans,” he says.
“I posted a photo of the Koenigsegg One:1 with the simple caption, ‘Welcome home,’ and we had 100 people here literally at the dealership within an hour, just to see the car,” David said. “A good dealer today has to understand modern marketing through social media.”
As the modern super-luxury market continues to change, automakers and dealers are changing the way they seduce new buyers—and keep the romance alive with longtime clients. Here’s how they do it.
1. Understand the New, Young Market
At Bugatti’s showroom in Greenwich, Conn., dealers have long known that the typical individual who places an order for the $2.5 million Chiron (wait list: six months) already owns Bugatti’s previous multimillion-dollar stunner, the Veyron. Those owners are also acutely attuned to social media and are well under the age of 50.
Three thousand miles west, at the opening of the Newport Beach Pagani dealership last month in California, company founder Horacio Pagani himself told me the average age of his customers is “more toward 30 or 35 years old—even in the 20s, in some cases.”
“Our customer has changed,” he said simply. (David, to wit: “The guy who walks into the showroom in a suit is a Ponzi scheme artist; the guy who comes in in flip-flops and shorts just got off his yacht.”)