Tag Archives: female friendly

FOXY Lady Drivers Club identifies and works with the best and female friendly garages and car dealerships nationwide across the UK.

marketing to women, Social Media

Why blogging matters to small businesses

We’ll soon be merging this blog with the News and Information section of our website. Our various blog topics have all grown like Topsy but from 2018 FOXY Lady Blogs will be posted HERE, to make it easier for our readers.

FOXY Lady blog is critical to getting our message across. In our new Blog Section you’ll find a blog post explaining why we write what we do and how our blog reflects our strategic business plans. It’s all part of our ‘drive’ (pardon the pun) to get what we do to a wider audience as part of an affordable and measurable PR plan.

To raise awareness about the Club, I started the FOXY Lady blog in March 2008, writing for and about women drivers.

It’s not a sexy read and I doubt it’ll make it to the top of a busy female’s ‘must read’ blog list but if women want to know about motoring they stand a chance of finding useful insider information here, with their best interests at heart, when they need it most. Or decide to join the Club for 1:1 support of course.

Writing about motoring for women is certainly a perilous path to tread (some prefer simple and lightweight content whereas others find that approach patronising…) but I do this to amplify the Club’s key messages and for a whole raft of good business reasons.

FOXY

Find FOXY at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/foxyladydrivers
Find FOXY at Twitter: https://twitter.com/foxytweets

driving instructors

WANTED – Female friendly driving instructors across the UK

We’re told it takes more lessons for young women to pass their driving test than young men on average.

Exceptions apply as ever.

An explanation for this might be research suggesting that females of all ages are more nervous than their male counterparts.

But the way I see it is that young women have fewer accidents than (most) young men so isn’t it a good thing to have more lessons, be cautious and take longer to become a better driver?

Regardless of age, I speak to a lot of women who suffer from a lack of driver confidence. Maybe they don’t drive much nowadays so it doesn’t come as naturally as it did. Or perhaps it’s because of our crowded roads and all too frequently reported incidents of road rage.

Many tell me they’re frightened about tackling motorways, driving a new (strange) car and they often struggle to concentrate at times – on a familiar route to work perhaps or after a bad night’s sleep?

Driving Instructors that understand women

This is why FOXY is recruiting a new Register of Driving Instructors that are sympathetic towards our gender perspective and who are ready, patient and willing to make us better drivers at the end of the day.

The theory is that if your Driving Instructor is measurably better than the rest you’ll likely need fewer lessons to pass and if it’s a more enjoyable time at the wheel, you’ll relax and have fun. Why shouldn’t learning to drive be fun as well as informative, whether it’s your first lessons, completing the PassPlus programme, taking your Advanced Motoring test or blacking up for a confidence or motorway driving refresher course.

So if you can recommend a genuinely female friendly Driving Instructor who’s getting things right for women as is, we’d be happy to FOXY Lady Approve them then introduce them to local lady drivers.

FOXY Lady Approved Driving Instructors

To be FOXY Lady Approved, Driving Instructors need to be approved by the Driver Vehicle and Standards Agency (DVSA) and follow the ADI/DVSA voluntary Code of Practice for starters. We then list additional credentials, the various courses they offer and female feedback. We want to know if the Instructor was punctual, friendly and a good teacher, for example. And whether the car was safe, clean and well-maintained? Marks out of 5 please from 1 as in woeful to 5 as in wonderful…

Finally, in exchange for feedback about any FOXY Lady Approved Driving Instructor, their female pupils can claim a free lifetime Online Member subscription to FOXY Lady Drivers Club as a thank you.

No, driving instructors don’t have to be female to be FOXY Lady Approved in fact this is another area to do with motoring where there are many more men doing this job than females. Which is where FOXY can help again – we want to raise awareness among women drivers that being a Driving Instructor is both a satisfying and meaningful career option. So motorists can have a gender choice when it comes to choosing a local Driving Instructor to suit their needs and expectations.

FOXY

For More Information

To recommend a genuinely female friendly Instructor (male or female) please email drivinginstructors@foxyladydrivers.com.

To see who and where the EARLYBIRD Instructors are on board.

To find out how to join us.

garage services

FOXY lays down Kwik-Fit gauntlet

It can’t just be me that links bad media PR with the brand name Kwik-Fit.

But is this because they’re more likely to be targeted in national ‘sting’ operations, as one of the biggest UK garage groups, when a publication wants national not local coverage?

Maybe the time is right to bury that bad PR once and for all Kwik-Fit?

If you want to walk the FOXY walk we’d be happy to work with you to defend your business and promote that message.

Here’s why we’re suggesting this matters, as an example of how damaging this sort of PR can be. Here’s the latest rip off tale of customer woe about Kwik-Fit along these lines…

So what are you doing about this, Itochu (who owns Kwik-Fit)? Probably lots is happening behind the scenes that few motorists know of.

So I’d like to invite you to join our network of FOXY Lady Approved garages so we can police your quality standards and together we’ll put the record straight – one way or another.

To join the FOXY Lady Approved garage network

To join us and start the ball rolling you’d need to…

1/ Get Kwik-Fit staff to sign the FOXY Promise to ‘never overcharge, patronise or sell us anything we don’t need’.

2/ Demonstrate EITHER staff on the IMI Professional Register OR that branches are members of a Chartered Trading Standards Approved Code of Practice scheme like The Motor Ombudsman, Trust My Garage or Bosch Car Service.

As such, Kwik-Fit Directors and Centre Managers could not incentivise retail staff to sell certain products or services motorists’ don’t need.

3/ Confirm performance levels by regular female feedback.

PS: FOXY has its own complaints handling processes which it’d happily share with Kwik-Fit re women drivers.

Is this too much to ask of Kwik-Fit?

Undoubtedly Kwik-Fit does a lot of good work but it’s a big operation and wherever staff are involved, there’s room for human error. But if Kwik-Fit wants to do a better job, we’re here to help them move the bar upwards in terms of customer service.

They’d need to make a commitment to better motoring services for women, by working with us.

And we’d then be in a position to stick up for them when the media turns on them again.

As I see it, this’d be good for the automotive industry as well. Because they get tarnished by customers’ bad tales, fairly or otherwise.

By all means give me a ring on 01903 879988 to get the ball rolling.

You really should do something Itochu and standing up for your business values, working with us, sounds like a positive way to make a difference.

FOXY

To have your say about Kwik-Fit. please use Twitter and our @FOXYTweets feed.

car shopping

Is this a female friendly car dealership record?

Bassetts-Nissan-Bridgend-1-of-1-768x667

Bassetts Nissan in Bridgend is laying down a female gauntlet claiming to be the most female friendly car dealership in Wales because of the number of female staff they employ.

Here are the six women in their team – Jo Thomas, Sales Controller, Mags Button, Sales Executive, Abby Pedersen, Sales Admin, Amy Crothers, Service Manager, Natalie Edwards, Service Advisor and Sarah Parsons, Receptionist.

Now we are great fans of Nissan in Japan with their concierge and creche services to enhance the car shopping experience for women but we think this MIGHT well be the first instance of a female takeover in a UK showroom anywhere…

Unless of course, you know different?

FOXY

PS: As a FOXY Lady Approved dealership within the same Bassetts family, Bassetts of Swansea might have something to say here. And they’re offering members of FOXY Lady Drivers Club an extra 10% affinity car shopping discount off brand new Citroens, just to make us females feel more at home in a dealership than ever before.

PPS: To find a female friendly garage or car dealer near you, search the FOXYChoice.com website for your local quality choices.

female friendly

MOT and a manicure anyone?

Carterton MOT and treatment-1

Would you buy an MOT and a manicure, or a massage, if they were attractively packaged and priced? I’d certainly consider it.

As you may know, FOXY Lady Drivers Club includes a network of garages that meet our standards in terms of quality, ethics, value for money, cleanliness and customer services.

We do this because few women realise that garages aren’t regulated and mechanics don’t have to be licensed to repair our cars. Which can make for dangerous cars and rip off practices which we know a lot about.

So we check out garage credentials for females and then promote them as FOXY Lady Approved ie female friendly, requiring regular female feedback to keep them on our network and their toes.

To the best of my knowledge one of our FOXY Lady Approved garages in Oxfordshire, called Carterton Auto Repair, is the first in the UK to offer women the combination of manicures and massages included in the cost of their MOT. As you might expect, this is a bit of light-hearted marketing fun but not everyone always sees gender marketing messages in this light.

Just for the record, this sort of initiative isn’t new in the US, France or Australia where women seem more relaxed about this choice of customer services.

What Mumsnetters think of Manicures in Garages

So where best to find out what UK women think about all this than that august barometer of female taste, Mumsnet. Posted under Feminism/Womens Rights this is what NotRealName wanted her fellow Mums to react to, followed by others taking similar and opposed stances.

notrealname

LassWI

Jen

enquiringminge

Mide

vestal

_______________________________________

All this makes for interesting insight for FOXY of course, because motoring services for women are what we do. But it just shows you how different women can be from each other, let alone men. And how unforgiving women can be when it comes to their gender…

Luckily Carterton services are optional and we know why they are doing this and I’m sure it’s a practice that’ll spread, even if you drop your car off and go next door for your manicure.

Men can be arsey too

And if anyone thinks it’s just women that can be arsey here, think again. In a garage in Kent last week the owner told me he’d had to remove his offer of a free Club membership for women drivers leaving feedback because the men wanted to know why they didn’t get one. The owner didn’t know to say ‘Sign your FOXY Lady up, Bill’ and you can likely share her offers and such like.

All this is ironic really. The garage industry has been run by men for men since WWII. Even today only a woeful 2% of staff in the retail motor industry are female. And now that the number of women drivers is about to outnumber that of men, men aren’t prepared to put up with female service levels today, after expecting us to do precisely this for 70 years…

And if men had sorted out the motoring industry during their 70 year reign, it wouldn’t be as dysfunctional as it is and there’d be no need for a motoring support service like ours for women. Which would be an all round good thing.

So let’s all grow up here.

Women are different from each other.

Men and women are different from each other.

Mumsnetters include mouthy and tolerant feminist views alike.

We all need to get on with it and let individual choice prevail.

Let’s celebrate well-intentioned initiatives like Cartertons (and FOXY) that are designed to give us choices that didn’t exist beforehand. It mightn’t be for you and it’s definitely not meant for everyone. But it’s called personal choice and I for one buy it.

FOXY