Tag Archives: Orange

buying a new car

Is Orange the right car colour for Nissan?


Nissan has been having some fun here, with spare marketing money to spend, and women in mind.

Silly us – it seems we may have been buying the wrong coloured cars – what we need are ones to match our personalities.

Fortunately we can now check the right colour (of Nissan Micra) online, using a Chatbot app at Facebook. What a relief.

Apparently our choice of car colour has nothing to do with delivery times or the number of freshly painted new cars sitting in a field somewhere waiting for buyers.

It’s more to do with conservative colour choices and sensitivity on behalf of others. For example, maybe you’ve always really wanted a bright pink car to reflect your feminine side but didn’t buy one because you’re thinking about the resale value or flak from the PinkStinks brigade…

Both excellent reasons not to buy pink I’d have said (in a deep voice) but you wouldn’t be doing your personality justice on our roads says Nissan (who did have a pink Micra).

Here are the ‘facts’ from Nissan research into 5000 European car buyers.
+ 86% have chosen the wrong-coloured car for their personality type
+ Approximately two-thirds went for more traditional / conservative colours
+ 38% are currently driving a grey or black vehicle
+ 53% claimed colour had impacted their vehicle choice
+ Of those, more than half claimed to have selected their favourite colour

So we asked colour psychologist Karen Haller to interpret these for us in the light of Brexit negotiations.

She explained…

“Social factors always come into play with colour choices. For example, in times of economic uncertainty (seen by the Remainers perhaps) we’d play it safe and pick a car with a neutral palette – such as black, white or grey. So I’m not surprised that two-thirds of motorists are driving more conservative shades.”

Human response to colour goes right back to early childhood we’re told. It’s not always determined by symbolism or an association, but by in-built ‘hard wiring’ over which we have no control.

But with new and high-energy colours like orange reflecting energetic, fun and optimistic traits maybe this’d appeal more to UK Brexiteers?

And with Nissan set to bump up car production in Sunderland based on Brexit plans, we’d expect this optimism to convert into many orange car sales in 2018…
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If you want to find out what colour car suits your personality, best ask a Nissan car dealer about your choices but if you’d like to know more, there’s a new Facebook Page called Nissan’s innovative Chatbot.

We hope you’ll tell us about your car colour choices at FOXY’s Facebook Page please…

FOXY

FOXY Lady Drivers Club

women

Steph goes sleuthing in Shoreditch

I’m not a techie by a long stretch of the imagination although I’ve become au fait with writing blogs and doing the occasional social media posting so I’m not a total dunce.

But when it comes to phones my teenager son sees me in the dark ages. ‘What you need Mum is a mobile app to do that’ he tells me…

So, on behalf of other women who might feel like me about these things, I determined to find out more when a mysterious envelope arrived, addressed to Agent X (aka the FOXY Voice) with a ‘comms apparatus’ in it and an invitation to make my way to St Pancras, undercover, to make sense of all this.

Rendezvous was in the entrance to the Hotel Renaissance lobby where I joined a small group of similarly curious ‘special agents.’

We were part of a team to be led by Agent Limo and his men; all wearing black suits and aviator sunglasses. We all soon adopted the same suspicious and nervous twitch, looking over our shoulders uneasily expecting the unexpected at all times…

‘Top secret’ we were told as we were directed into stretch limos specially selected for the occasion (the champagne was on ice…) and poised to take us on the next stage of our journey.

‘Here’s the comms apparatus you need for the evening’ said Agent Limo and after assembling our new San Diego smartphone from Orange we were introduced to our vital partner in crime for the evening, Telmap’s M8 navigation app to help us through the thrills and spills the evening was about to reveal.

An art theft in Hoxton

‘Something’s happening in Hoxton so search for local tweets as clues’ we were told. Easy we found. That’s what M8 Community is all about. We soon picked up on the shady rumour that something was about to happen at the hip Hoxton Gallery so using our sat nav map app M8 we were able to direct our limo driver there in record time, arriving at the same time as the paparazzi and to the sound of flash photography as we attempted to disguise our everyday identity. Just in case.

And just in time to witness the theft of the valuable piece of art on the easel…

Just as the artist was about to unveil it, a helmeted Stig-like biker rushed in, grabbed her art off the easel and rushed out again before we’d had a chance to sample our now badly-shaken martinis…

Off again, but this time fast and on foot, assisted by M8 tweets and navigation app, we found ourselves in a local gangster bar with time for further refreshments.

Fed by further clues, we found ourselves in the men’s urinals (it’s a long story, best told over a drink), to see the thief with his artwork under his arm in the streets below hailing a London bus towards Shoreditch.

A wedding in Shoreditch

And so we followed in hot pursuit, this time aided by strategically placed special agents en route who had seen the villain ahead of us. To the unlikely venue of Shoreditch Town Hall…

‘No’ the receptionist said ‘we have no art thieves here…’ but then she paused adding ‘…unless it’s the couple getting married upstairs?!’

And so it was. We sneaked in en masse and with phone cameras flashing catching the Vicar, organist, bridegroom in full leathers and biker helmet on and, surprise, surprise, the bride who was the artist herself!!

By this time the police were involved and after a brief and noisy skirmish mid ceremony the couple were accosted, admitted to insurance fraud, hauled off to prison and the work of art was finally revealed…

The work of art…

You’ve got it – the highly valuable new work of art we’d been invited to see was Telmap’s new M8 map app.

The very one that’d helped us through London’s busy, hip and stylish streets that evening to eventually solve the canvas crime in question…

My M8 verdict?

I’m impressed and think other women will be, particularly when navigating towns and cities they don’t know. It’s also free and comes with useful Trip Advisor and Facebook feeds from local friends.

I can now use a mobile map app and used M8 to get me back to St Pancras and Sussex that evening. And whilst I use Google maps on a daily basis I had foolishly thought that map apps would be much the same whoever owned them but I’m now told that Telmap’s M8 is literally streets ahead of Apple’s iOS 6 which none of my fellow agents could recommended in its current unreliable state.

So that’s fairly impressive I thought – for Telmap to steal a lead over Apple in terms of sat nav mobile apps. So I now look forward to reading what better informed techie others say about M8 and its performance compared to Google maps…

To visit the M8 website: http://www.mylocalm8.com/

To download the free UK live sat nav by Telmap M8 for iPhone:

To download M8 for Android: Google Play

Thank you Telmap for one of the wackiest, most memorable and fun evenings I’ve spent for a long time!

I found myself in good company, well fed and watered and in an area of London I hadn’t realised is now the ‘in’ place for sophisticated nightlife.

Very enjoyable.

FOXY

PS: Here’s the video in case you don’t believe me…

female friendly

Can customer loyalty be bought?

How much is it going to be guys?

Some companies clearly think you can buy customer loyalty but that’s often a very short term marketing strategy. It is grossly unfair that she who haggles hardest gets a better deal than she who doesn’t know to haggle or what her choices are…

But should we need to haggle to get a price we should all be offered in the first place? It’s not very British after all. I prefer to know where I am, with businesses publishing a fixed price menu, and/or promising me their best price and then offering me a simple price matching guarantee should I find a lower price elsewhere after paying my money (terms apply of course). I’m usually suspicious of cheap prices anyway, especially in garages I don’t know, for fear of being ripped off in the end.

And whilst successful hagglers are usually assertive types (more often male, truth be told) who enjoy the chase for the lowest possible prices, I suggest that for every one woman who enjoys negotiating, there are two of us who feel this is probably below our dignity…we don’t have to do this on the High Street after all.

Which is why comparison websites are so popular of course because we can see our price choices without any stress; even though we all know we get what we pay for and that it’s vital to read the small print before we buy car insurance, for example. If only to see the excess we’re underwriting and whether it’ll cost us more to choose a FOXY Choice approved female friendly bodyshop for our accident repairs.

But why should those who don’t like to haggle be expected to live with a second rate deal? In fact, these females can be ones that tend to trust a business yet they are often the ones exploited by unscrupulous businesses. They don’t get a deal because they didn’t like to ask…

Take the following telecoms and insurance organisations, for example, who MoneySavingExpert.com tells us will reduce their prices if existing customers threaten to take their business elsewhere…  AA Breakdown, Admiral, BT, O2, Orange, Sky, T-Mobile, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Vodafone.

Those customers that threaten to take their business away save money, often quite a lot, whereas those that simply pay up regardless, pay more. Is that style of caveat emptor behaviour really fair? And what is even worse in my opinion is that very often existing customers are better off cancelling and signing up again because of preferential deals many offer new customers. Women don’t necessarily do this, because of the hassle involved at the time, but we aren’t stupid, the rot has set in and many of us will jump ship as soon as it suit us.

I am particularly interested in the subject of customer loyalty in the UK motor industry because many car dealerships will do a better new car buying deal at the end of a month or a sales quarter; whenever there is a sales target to be met. But who realises this when they walk into a showroom – the car salesman, who is often on commission, is not going to tell you this…

In FOXY’s experience the majority of women find haggling stressful and this mindset, in an unfamiliar shopping environment like a garage or car showroom, may explain why we often feel ill at ease and like to take a man with us for support. In 2011 for goodness sake; when women are the professional shoppers and the BIG gender spenders!

On the flipside, businesses that adopt and stick to a ‘What You See is What You Get’ (WYSIWYG) ‘no haggle’ policy are likely to be trusted more than others. It seems a more open and honest way to do business, it’s definitely less stressful and it’s clearly fairer for all.

If only the price we were quoted was always the best price at the time! Then the motor industry wouldn’t have the reputation it has for ripping off solo females (and many men who are less likely to admit that it happens to them too) who don’t know how to react in garages, dealerships or when dealing with a stressful accident claim.

FOXY

PS: Visit the FOXY Choice website to find out which female friendly UK garages, dealerships and fastfits have signed a commitment to not ‘overcharge, patronise or sell women anything they do not need or want.’ That’s the FOXY Promise and whilst it is primarily for women (because FOXY is a female brand) it’s also the sign of a measurably better and more trustworthy business for men too.