The Challenge
Robertson’s Power and Sports was already a successful power sports dealer in Sanford, Me. Robertson’s is a snowmobile, watercraft, motorcycle and ATV dealer that grew steadily each of its 15 years of business without doing as much advertising as would normally be advised.
When they did advertise they weren’t capturing all of the co-op advertising dollars available to them from their vendor manufacturers.
They had recently built new service space and are in the process of building a new showroom. It was time to take their dealership to a new level.
Garry Robertson was skeptical of using radio, South End Media’s favorite medium.

The Solution
Start advertising!
All kidding aside, it was already snowmobile season when Robertson’s and South End Media began working together. We developed a plan for three months heavily weighted towards print and TV.
In April, Robertson’s Power and Sports was awarded a pit stop on Ski Doo’s Spring Tour of 2004 snowmobiles. For this event we used all three of the major media with most of the budget now tilted towards radio.
For motorcycle season part of our strategy was to partner with two radio stations, The Wave and The Shark to give away two pairs of Suzuki junior dirt bikes. Our packages included trade and heavy on-air promotion for maximum exposure on a fairly small budget.
Our plans for Sea Doo Watercraft season started with TV in early May to get people thinking about summer and getting on the water. We followed that with print and radio promoting Sea Doo sales programs around Memorial Day, the first days of summer, the 4th of July and through the month of July.

What Happened?
Robertson’s sold out their Ski Doo and Polaris snowmobile inventory for the season. We’d like to take all the credit, but we also had quite the winter!
The Spring Tour event on April 4, 2003 wound up being held on the day of the last snowstorm of the season. We expected an empty store forgetting that we were promoting to snowmobilers who go out in all kinds of weather. Instead, during the five hour event we had an estimated 300 customers come through the door who placed 7 orders for 2004 Ski Doo snowmobiles they couldn’t even take delivery on until fall of 2003.
We actually had to suspend Sea Doo advertising before the 4th of July because Robertson’s had sold out their stock, a first for them. In September they were awarded Sea Doo District Dealer of the Year, another first.
Robertson’s now receives all the co-op dollars allotted to them from the manufacturers.