
Automobile is a key factor in lives of most of the people. The time people spend inside their respective vehicle is ever increasing thus leaving room for interaction. Automobile is becoming more and more important in day to day communication of activities. For 2016 in United States a total of 17.55 million vehicles were sold of which 60% were classified as light trucks. With several different automobile manufacturers & models to choose from; it becomes difficult to select one from such large options. Here in the presales activity come into picture which is packed with load of information & data required before to close the sales deal. The post fordist era is marked by service sector economy taking on the mass produced industrial economy. Thus making aftermarket services a significant source of revenue than sales of new vehicle.
In today’s time the internet has become a dominant source of information the user usually interacts with before finalizing the deal; thus automobile manufacturer have to reasonably publish data & information in catalog formats to be able to pre-serve the consumer. Automobile catalog is a key document which includes features & unique selling proposition of the vehicle on sale. These catalogs are either static or dynamic in nature to deal with the nature of query of detailed specifications, technical data and performance data. Catalog in term refers to a document providing systematic information of the product. There are number of vendors available in the market to process the automobile catalog service. These vendors offer software as service to reduce the overheads & meet the clients’ expectation.
Automobile catalog have to be in standard formats so that they could be easily compared for competitiveness and decision making. This feature attribute of the catalog needs to be preserved and well designed to address the market. It is a front end document of the company with which the users usually interact; so it has to be as comprehensive as possible such that user gets the best possible output in the least amount of time. The life cycle of a catalog is on annual basis after which it needs to be updated and designed for the next year cycle with new color schema products & content. The e catalog service provider has become a niche market in itself, wherein 3rd party vendors get to provide managed services for the automobile manufacturer, retailer or distributor. These vendor specialized environment provide optimized & efficient solutions to deal with automobile catalog content. The vendor services are such that they are available for a monthly subscription fee or pay per use services or as paid per hour services. What an automobile catalog does not provide is the feel factor and the touch; addressed by test drives.