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Blue Sitten did not grow up dreaming about dealerships. She did not study automotive marketing or spend her early career navigating the lot. She came from somewhere else entirely — brand management, agency life, social strategy — and that outside perspective turned out to be exactly what Yoder Family of Companies needed.
Today, Blue works as a Marketing Specialist at Yoder Family of Companies, a purpose-driven, faith-rooted multi-brand automotive group based in Greeley, Colorado. The organization — which includes Weld County Garage, Truck City, Abra Collision, DriveWise, Driven Financial Services, Kayman Direct, and TC Customs — has been part of the Northern Colorado community since 1908. It is a company that takes its identity seriously. And so does Blue.
This is the third installment of the VIN Rev Journal's Women in Automotive Marketing series. Like the women who came before her in these pages, Blue brings something this industry still needs more of: a clear-eyed, human-centered view of what marketing actually is — and what it is not.
Most people who end up in automotive marketing either grew up around cars or stumbled into a dealership job and never left. Blue Sitten took neither path. Her career started in places that, on paper, have nothing to do with vehicles — a university marketing department, a marketing agency, a supermarket brand team, an executive coaching firm.
At Florida Gulf Coast University, she managed social media and promotions as a student. She moved into agency life at Big Sea, then into brand work at Publix Super Markets, where she served as a Brand Advancement Associate and Manager. Along the way, she picked up deep experience in social strategy, content creation, and campaign design — skills that translate everywhere, including an industry she had not yet considered.
That background shaped how she sees the work today. Blue did not enter automotive with a chip on her shoulder about what she did not know. She entered it with genuine curiosity — and a foundation in consumer behavior that the industry often overlooks.
"I came from the corporate sector, where I marketed for a supermarket conglomerate, and that experience prepared me well. Everyone needs a car, just like everyone needs groceries, so the question became: how do I get consumers to spend their money on ours?" — Blue Sitten, Marketing Specialist, Yoder Family of Companies
That reframe — from cars to consumers — is exactly the kind of thinking a multigenerational family business needs to stay relevant. Weld County Garage has survived two world wars, the Great Depression, and a complete industry transformation. It did not make it to its second century by accident. It got there by serving real people in real ways. Blue understands that assignment.
When you ask Blue how automotive marketing has shifted, she does not reach for the easy answer. She does not say "social media" or "digital everything" and call it a day. She has thought about this.
The landscape, she says, is faster and more demanding than it used to be. The shiny objects never stop coming — new platforms, new vendors, new tools that promise to solve problems you did not know you had. Marketing teams inside dealerships have had to become technology operators as much as creative thinkers. That dual demand is real, and not everyone navigates it well.
But the most honest thing Blue says about where the industry is heading is also the most important: the real opportunity is not another platform update. It is not a smarter bidding strategy or a better SEO stack. Those things matter, and if you are not doing them well, you are behind. But they are table stakes now.
"The real opportunity is in relationship-building. No ad will ever be more powerful than a friend's recommendation or the latest obsession in a group chat." — Blue Sitten
That observation lands differently when you consider where Yoder Family of Companies operates. Greeley, Colorado is not a major metro market. It is a community where people know each other, where reputation travels fast, and where what you do locally matters as much as what you spend digitally. The best marketing Blue can do there is not the most technically sophisticated. It is the most human.
AI is already here, she points out. So is strong SEO. So is GEO strategy. Dealers who are not doing those things are already behind. The ones doing them well are keeping up. But the ones who will actually win? They are the ones using modern tools without losing the human side of the relationship.
Ask Blue about her proudest professional moment and you get an answer that says more about her character than her resume. She does not name a campaign metric or a record-breaking month. She talks about process, teamwork, and the feeling in the room when an idea becomes real.
The work she points to is a lead-generation tool she helped develop — a project that began as a thought and ended up on the desk. What makes her proud is not just the output. It is who touched it along the way. Industry peers who gave honest feedback. Colleagues who pushed back during the prototypes. Every hand that helped shape it.
That instinct — to share credit, to name the community that made something possible — is not just humility. It is strategic intelligence. In a business as relationship-driven as automotive, the people who understand that their success is connected to the success of their team tend to go further. Blue understands that clearly.
At Yoder Family of Companies, where the organizational mission is explicitly about serving others and being a positive force in Northern Colorado, that orientation fits. The marketing is not separate from the mission. It is how the mission shows up publicly. Blue is the person responsible for making sure that comes through.
Blue does not sugarcoat this section. Automotive is still male-dominated. That is not an opinion; it is a structural reality that anyone working inside a dealership group knows firsthand.
What she offers is not a complaint but an honest accounting of the dynamic. Women in this industry often bring a distinct ability to read the room — to understand how customers feel, what they need emotionally, and how to shape a brand experience around those realities. That emotional intelligence is a real competitive advantage. And it costs something.
"The emotional labor behind our projects can be much heavier," she says. "We are not just building campaigns; we are often carrying the tone, the empathy, and the relational nuance that make those campaigns effective." That work is frequently invisible in a performance review. The CTR looks the same whether it came from a campaign built with that extra layer of care or without it. But the compounding effect over time — the trust built with customers, the tone set in every piece of content — that is where it shows up.
Women in automotive marketing often bring the human element back to organizations that have started to sound like spreadsheets. That is valuable. It should be recognized and compensated accordingly. Blue believes it will be, eventually. The industry is changing, if slowly.
The advice Blue gives to women early in their automotive marketing careers is not what most people say. She does not lead with confidence or hustle. She leads with strategy.
You cannot just be right, she says. You have to be persuasive. The most effective ideas in this industry are not the ones that were simply correct — they are the ones that survived internal resistance, built buy-in across departments, and got executed. A brilliant campaign that dies in a Monday morning meeting never helped a single customer.
"You have to learn how to bring people with you. Learn the craft, absolutely, but also learn how to navigate the room." — Blue Sitten
That means presenting ideas in ways that make people feel included rather than challenged. It means knowing when to push, when to educate, and when to let someone else feel like they got there first. None of that diminishes your capability. It amplifies your effectiveness.
The internal politics of a dealership group — especially a multi-brand group like Yoder Family of Companies, where marketing touches eight different businesses with different audiences and cultures — is its own discipline. Blue has learned it. She is still learning it. That honesty alone is worth something to anyone just starting out.
There is room for more women in automotive marketing. The industry is better when they are in it. But the path in requires more than a good portfolio. It requires the patience to build trust before building momentum, and the confidence to know that the two are not in conflict — they are the same thing.
What strikes me most about Blue Sitten is not her résumé — it is her perspective. She came from outside this industry, saw it clearly without the blind spots that come from growing up in it, and started asking the kind of questions that insiders stop asking.
That is rare. And it is exactly what automotive marketing needs more of. The dealers and dealer groups that will win the next decade are not going to win it by outspending everyone on digital. They will win it by building something worth remembering — a brand that feels like a neighbor, not a billboard. Blue is building that at Yoder Family of Companies. Watch this one closely.