A leading UK car dealership has bolstered its North East-based sales and services team with a key appointment at its County Durham showroom.
Richard Skinner has joined Cooper BMW Durham, part of the Inchcape Group, as the franchise’s new head of business.
With over 19 years’ experience working in the automotive sector for Lloyd BMW, Richard has unparalleled knowledge of the region’s car market. Having worked across the sales and marketing department on behalf of well-known brands including Audi, Volkswagen, Volvo and BMW, Richard has twice been named as BMW car dealer of the year during his career.
In his new role, Richard will be responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations of the Cooper BMW Durham site, including marketing and sales outreach.
“I’m delighted to have joined the team at Cooper,” Richard said.
“Cooper is the largest BMW dealer group in the North East with a long and illustrious heritage for great customer service, so I recognised that this was a really great opportunity.
“I am also really excited to be working in County Durham. It’s easily accessible to customers from Newcastle, Sunderland and Teesside and is extremely highly-regarded as a city of culture and influence. I am really excited about growing Cooper Durham’s local image and making it the North East’s number one BMW retailer for sales and service.”
In order to achieve this, in one of his first acts as head of business, Richard appointed social media advertising agency, Epic Social, to help raise the profile of the dealership online through a new, highly-effective digital marketing strategy.
Founded in 2017, Epic Social specialises in creating premium-quality content designed specifically to help brands engage their target demographics through social media.
“Despite its prestige, local awareness of the Cooper brand at present is quite low,” Richard added.
“Bringing some marketing expertise into the mix to help us boost our presence seemed like the obvious thing to do and having worked with the team at Epic Social in a previous role, I couldn’t think of a better candidate. They know the market and the local area well and I’m really looking forward to working with them going forward.”
Ben Maughan, managing director at Epic Social, said:
“We’re happy to be supporting Richard in his new role at Cooper BMW with his plans to grow the brand.
“This is a really exciting time for the business and we hope to be able to showcase this through the range of content that we will be producing for the company’s various social media channels.”
