2021 Honoree

Shannon Lara, Director of Marketing, Aftermarket Dayco North AmericaShannon Lara, director of Marketing, Aftermarket for Dayco North America, knows this industry inside and out. She began her automotive career working in the ACDelco Customer Service Call Center and before long, she pursued and landed a marketing support position out of the Buick World Headquarters facility in her hometown of Flint, Michigan. That’s all it took, Lara says. “Supporting new automotive product and technology launches afforded me an opportunity to travel and begin to build my automotive network. I was hooked. These were ‘my people’ and I quickly fell in love with the industry overall,” she says.What Lara describes as her proudest career moment also is what sets her apart as a marketing professional in the aftermarket. In 2012, she was asked to lead a global web development project, which inspired Lara to pursue certification in Observational Voice of the Customer (OVOC). This enabled her to visit customers in their workplaces (sometimes for hours), watching them conduct business, observing their surroundings and taking it all in. “I was able to understand what made them ‘tick,’” she says. “By keeping the OVOC process top of mind, I’ve been able to ideate and activate customer-facing programs that truly move the needle throughout my career. Getting to the root of a customer’s problem and then providing digital and traditional sales tools and solutions that will help impact their bottom line and improve the quality of their business is what motivates me at work every day.”