Watching Your Car Get Serviced Via Smartphone An Integral Part Of Lincoln Strategy

Lincoln’s free-falling sales will apparently be remedied by allowing customers to watch their cars get serviced via smart phone, if you can stomach the party line coming from Ford marketing boss Jim Farley. Also outlined were Lincoln’s idea of “luxury” and powertrain details for the upcoming MKZ

First and foremost, the MKZ will get unique powertrains, and with the Fusion packing only 4-cylinders, this must mean a V6 engine is slated for the MKZ. Automotive News also detailed Lincoln’s new approach to customer service with Farley stating

“It’s as if some luxury brands have become big-box retailers, efficient and soulless, forgetting the hallmarks that made them special in the first place and leaving their clients feeling like a number and not a name,”

Poor customer service and haughty sales people have never stopped aspirational strivers from buying luxury goods – sales staff at Saks or Neiman Marcus have a lot of attitude considering that they make minimum wage, but that won’t stop credit card jockeys from snapping up the latest branded crap sewn by Indonesian child labor. On the other hand, good sales people know that their wealthy clients often come in dressed like paupers because they couldn’t care less about “projecting an image of success” like so many status insecure upper-middle types.

The most peculiar passage in the entire article detailed a cockamaime plan where “… service bays at Lincoln dealerships will have cameras so customers can use their smartphones to watch the work being performed on their cars.” Based on anecdotal evidence gleaned through a couple decades of life experience, the sort of affluent, professional trend-setter types Lincoln is hoping to attract either don’t have the time or inclination to watch a grease-splattered Lincoln tech change the oil or bleed the brakes on their leased MKZ. This will surely be a costly initiative, and the money could have been spent in a million more productive ways aside from a stupid gimmick like this. If you are one of those types who wants to watch your car get a brake job via your iPhone, please let me know in the comments. For more laughable ideas, see the first paragraph of the Automotive News article where Lincoln’s negligible market-share is glossed over as a virtue of it being a “boutique brand”