Mike Maroone, COO of AutoNation Inc., says the nation's largest dealership group is meeting the goals of a multiyear $100 million branding campaign.

Stores in each of the company's 15 markets now are all branded as AutoNation, replacing regional dealership names, such as John Lance outside Cleveland, some of which stood for 100 years, Maroone said.

And AutoNation is preparing to launch new websites that will allow shoppers to do much of the vehicle transaction online, including obtaining committed trade-in prices and financing terms.

Moreover, AutoNation has built a large marketing department, which even handles all paid-search advertising for the company and its 228 stores, Maroone said.

As a consequence of building its own brand, AutoNation will rely less on third-party Internet shopping sites for customer traffic and prospects, Maroone said.

"We have a unique opportunity to build our brand, and we're going to do it," he said.

Maroone, 60, was interviewed Sept. 3 by Staff Reporter David Barkholz.

Q: How is the branding campaign going?

A: We started the branding in February 2013. We completed it at the end of June [2013]. Twice a year, we do what we call "brand monitor," where we look at aided and unaided awareness of the brand. And I would say that brand awareness and brand consideration have grown immensely. They are now dwarfing the legacy names, some of which were 100 years old and most of which were at least 10 to 15 years old.

Certainly, it is disruptive to do it. But it was a no-brainer given the growth of the digital opportunity and our ability of being united under one name to take advantage of that opportunity.

What are some highlights?

Our campaign speaks to the brand attributes we're trying to do: a fairness, market-value, everyday-low-price concept. First of all, tremendous marketing spend. Very strong TV marketing campaign. Very strong SEM [search engine marketing] and [search engine optimization] campaign. Massive direct-mail and email effort. It's a comprehensive campaign, multichannel with a significant spend.

And underneath it, a strong internal campaign. [CEO] Mike Jackson and I literally traveled to every major market. We held rallies. Talked about the AutoNation brand and what it stood for.

How much has the mix changed with digital vs. traditional marketing spend?

It has changed with the market. It was moving rapidly to greater digital before the brand change. It's even moving quicker now. Our marketing department used to be 12 people. It's almost 60 today. We've taken a tremendous amount of the [website] development work. We have our own in-house SEM and in-house SEO, where almost every other retailer farms that out and uses the same vendor or group of vendors. We've built those capabilities internally.

What percent of the ad spend is digital?

I'd say we are 25 to 30 percent digital. Five years ago, we were maybe 10 percent. Two years ago, it might be 15 to 20 percent. But we're moving rapidly. It's about building the capabilities. It's not about throwing the money. It's about having real expertise. And in this case, we wanted to develop it internally.

Do individual stores do any of their own paid search?

No. All of that is done centrally. And we measure everything we do.

What was the feedback after AutoNation made clear earlier this year that it believed it could get more value from its own branding than spending money with third-party lead providers?

Initially, people didn't even like being classified in the bucket of third-party lead providers. There was a little bit of emotional pushback, but we have very constructive relationships with them.

But the message is clear: This is about building long term the AutoNation brand. We're not going to stop using the third parties. But we would rather reinvest in our own brand and drive traffic to our own website than drive traffic to somebody else's website and have to pay for it.

You've said that third-party traffic is the most expensive for AutoNation. How so?

Some of it is efficient while some is very inefficient. But you have to look at [the fact] that the third parties want to enter into multiple profit centers, including finance and used car. You have to put that into the cost of doing business with them.

I don't want a partner in my business. I don't mind spending marketing dollars. But I don't think I need to buy leads for service business or buy leads to sell used cars. We want to invest money to drive traffic to our site and build capabilities to acquire used cars and service customers in customer finance channels.

We don't need the third parties to help us do that.