Carabunga.com Announces `The Dealer's 1-to-1 Marketing Portal'
28 February 2000
Carabunga.com Announces `The Dealer's 1-to-1 Marketing Portal'; Provides Round-the-Clock E-Speed Marketing Resource for Online Promotions to Automotive Industry
SAN DIEGO--Feb. 28, 2000--Carabunga.com today announced that it intends to create "The Dealer's 1-to-1 Marketing Portal", a Web site that provides automobile dealers with an intuitive way to create customized or prepackaged promotional letters, coupon mailers, postcards, emails and telephone follow-up campaigns using the Internet.Available during the second quarter 2000, the new specialized dealer portal (www.carabunga.com) will allow dealers to quickly and easily craft nimble and targeted promotions and incentives to increase consumer visits to a specified dealership for service, sales and/or after-market product purchases. Dealers will also be able to respond to rapidly changing buyer circumstances, such as seasonal demand, emerging new preferences or even an announcement of a large-scale rebate by a major manufacturer.
Statistics provided by the National Automobile Dealers Association indicate that in 1999, automobile dealers spent $7 billion, or approximately $410 per vehicle sold, on advertising and promotion efforts to attract new car customers. As The Dealer's 1-to-1 Marketing Portal, Carabunga.com aims to help dealers make this spending more efficient delivering the right promotion offer to the right customer at the right time.
"Think of Carabunga.com as a continuously creative marketing team, never sleeping, always there to help dealers find the best prospects from their current databases who are willing and ready to buy another vehicle, and then designing and fulfilling a campaign tailored precisely to each individual customer's needs," said Jim Roche, president of Carabunga.com. "Carabunga.com also answers one of the main questions dealers face as electronic services and dot-coms have proliferated: How can a dealer participate in e-business and get results without having to become a Web guru or dot-com specialist?"
Carabunga.com is a subsidiary of Newgen Results Corporation , a leading provider of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology for the service sector of the U.S. retail automotive industry. Roche was formerly senior vice president, e-Services, for Newgen.
The Power of Online Promotions
An R.L. Polk study of new-car buyers in 1999 indicated that purchase decisions are often positively influenced by promotion-driven contact involving their previous vehicles. Some 81 percent of new car buyers said they were influenced by coupons for discounted service; more than 70 percent of new car buyers said they were influenced by maintenance reminders, personalized letters from the manufacturer and owner magazines.
The Internet helps improve consistency of these efforts, and can reduce expenses when compared to non-Internet approaches.
"There are many promises being made about applying the Internet to enhance dealership sales," continued Roche. "Newgen has the experience in the CRM marketplace that may be successfully applied to Carabunga.com and the next generation of e-promotion services for the automotive industry."
Carabunga.com will marry demographic data with dealer data, giving dealers the ability to cleanly target the best promotion recipients for their vehicle line or service niche. The service is also intended to free dealers from the limits of cumbersome data merging and reporting activities between stand-alone resources and improves the efficiency of budgeting for fixed and variable advertising costs.
"The real power to this site is the massive database of customer information that Newgen Results Corporation has built over the past five years," remarked Gerry Benowitz, Carabunga.com Chairman and Newgen Chairman and CEO. "While our database activities in the past have focused on retaining customers for routine service, this repurchase aspect will probably become even more important to the dealer over time. As we demonstrate its effectiveness, if Carabunga.com is able to divert even 15 percent of the existing mass media advertising budget, it would generate over $1.0 billion in recurring revenues."
About Carabunga.com, Inc.
Carabunga.com develops Web-based business-to-business e-promotion solutions that incorporate revolutionary one-to-one marketing techniques. With Carabunga.com, automotive dealers and manufacturers will use the Internet to deliver targeted communications via e-mail and direct mail supported by teleservice follow-up. Carabunga.com promotions are designed to help the automotive industry effectively use the Internet to increase consumer visits to a specified dealership for service, sales and/or after-market product purchases. For more information, visit .
About Newgen Results Corporation
Newgen Results Corp. [NASDAQ:NWGN] is a leading provider of Customer-Relationship Management (CRM) technology that combines expertise in database marketing and customer retention with an in-depth knowledge of service department operations to deliver highly targeted and customized solutions to the automotive community. Newgen currently supports 5,500 auto dealerships nationwide and maintains relationships with leading automotive companies, including Ford, Mitsubishi, Volvo, Audi, Acura, BMW, Volkswagen, Jaguar, Kia, Nissan, Infinity plus AutoNation and CarMax Auto Superstores. For more information, call 800-7NEWGEN or visit .
This news release contains certain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including statements about the formation and operation of Carabunga.com and the benefits of new and existing products. Such statements are only predictions and the company's actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. Factors that may cause such differences include, but are not limited to, rapidly changing product requirements, the introduction of new products by competitors of the company, and the Company's ability to successfully develop and deploy the Carabunga.com website and associated products and services. Theses factors and others are more fully discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" and elsewhere in Newgen's Registration Statement on Form S-1 (No. 333-62703) and in the Company's most recently filed quarterly report on form 10-Q, each as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.