The Role of Digital Video Content in Car Buying Customer Journey

Digital video is a trend of recent years. Nowadays companies actively use video advertising as the main promotion tool. However, in addition to advertising, there are other types of video content aimed to promote a product (or service), but they do not carry such an explicit advertising nature. The main reason why digital video is important for companies is the preference of Internet users. They consider video as a primary source of information, and therefore, in order to get the information they need about a particular vehicle, they watch videos on automotive topics. This propensity should encourage automotive manufacturers to use video content that will make the company's customer a potential buyer. The purpose of this work is to understand the role of automotive video content in digital media as part of the user's journey to the decision to buy a car. In order to achieve the above goal, the tasks were to define theoretical approaches to understanding digital video content and the consumer's path, to review the Russian automotive market and digital content on the automobile subject. The work also included qualitative and quantitative researches. The main research methods were factor analysis, correlation analysis, single-factor dispersion analysis. Based on the results obtained, a consumer path map was constructed and practical recommendations on the use of digital video content for automotive companies were presented.