TRUE CAR and ZAG Cyber Bandits, Parasites or Good for the Car Business?
Jim Ziegler asks...
I am hearing a lot of discussion about True Car and ZAG. I continually scratch my head and wonder if desperate dealers are doing the marketing limbo "How Low Can You Go?"
Are we so bad at what we do that we have to line up and pay vendors to lose money? AND, who is giving these people access to your data that is used against you?
Who owns these companies and what might be their ulterior motive? Sometimes I ask questions to which I already know the answer.
Am I wrong?
What do you think... JIM
Jim Ziegler's Guidance and Recommended Action Plan:
Ten Areas We Need to Concentrate on to Bring This Monster to It's Knees...
- Government investigation of ALL Data Aggregators taking consumer information from dealers' DMS. Sadly enough, dealers who do business with TrueCar are exposed to liability charges. Cut off all access to unecessary data, no matter who takes it from the dealers DMS and make it illegal to "resell identifiable consumer data" and "transactional data".
- Educate Your Fellow Dealers; If anyone takes financial transactional data, they expose the dealer that allowed it to violations, especially if it is passed on to other vendors or shared.
- Educate Consumers to what they're doing with their information...
a. You buy a car from a dealer, do you really want your personal information, and maybe even your financial information, passed along and sold and shared by "God knows who?"
b. These People Charge the Dealer $300 which the dealers have to build into the deal
c. Your Privacy and the Security of your Information could theoretically compromise your identity if you do business a company that takes data from the dealership. - Educate Investors and potential investors they could possibly be mislead if anyone is telling them this is a safe investment because of all of the dealers pushing back, associations pushing back, and government regulators in many states coming after TrueCar's business model as NOT compliant, in some cases they're saying it is Not Legal.
- AMEX, USAA and all of their affiliates do not want the bad consumer relations this push back is creating with their members and customers.
- Cancel your dealership's Affilation with TrueCar. Tell people with TrueCar certificates that YOU don't honor TrueCar and you feel the company is NOT reputable. Educate consumers as to perceived data exposure if they buy from a TrueCar dealer. Make sure that each consumer knows that using TrueCar actually increases their vehicle cost by $300 to $400.
- Make the dealers selling at huge losses take all of those deals. Big problem right now is too many Nissan Dealers and others are taking huge losers to get the factory money. The TrueCar reverse-auction business model will continually push those numbers down until the factory money is non-existent. Consumers need to hear from many dealers, "We don't do TrueCar"
- Keep calling your National and State Dealer Associations demanding they get involved and stay involved... No excuses.
- Get the Manufacturers into the game. If GM, Ford, Toyota, and other majors change the rules about how we advertise and do business to protect the dealers, we can cut off their ability to set pricing. So keep it up at every dealer meeting. Call your Dealer Council Members and protest to your factory reps. Tell the manufacturers, if they want showroom and facility improvements, we need the ability to make fair profits.
- Tell everyone you know. Educate other dealers and industry people. Watch the Painter interviews... I believe this is the first time a vendor has publicly announced they intend to bring down the dealers and hijack our business, taking our profits and starving us out with our own data. Painter has said manufacturers and dealers should go bankrupt and he, in his God-like way "will control distribution..."
When the TrueCar-Yahoo Deal kicks in we need to stand firm and "Just Say No" we don't honor TrueCar deals.
Read this article as a reference: http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20110831%2FFIN...
AND, if you doubt the mission... read this... http://www.zag.com/websiteASSETS/whitepapers/ZAG-WhitePaper3.pdf
Comment
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Comment by Heather Graham on February 22, 2012 at 11:47am
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So Michael, Dealers in Maryland were promised new terms back on the 8th. Each week, they push to next week. Any ETA on when these new terms will be released? Thx.
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Comment by Michael Timmons on February 22, 2012 at 11:38am
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Currently we are at approximately 4200 dealers. I have not seen the current list this week because it comes out today for the dealers that signed up last week. This is down from our high of around 5600 dealers. Our field team is in the process of converting dealers to our subscription model as recommended (and required) by many states. We still have the majority of states on our pay for performance model which is overwhelmingly preferred by our dealers.
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Comment by Thomas A. Kelly on February 20, 2012 at 3:12pm
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I was wondering the same thing George, perhaps Michael Timmons will share the correct number with us???
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Comment by George O'Sullivan on February 20, 2012 at 1:20pm
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@Thomas the job post is interesting. I wonder if they are adding or replacing people that are bailing. Also, it appears there is a bit of false advertising in the post. It says they have over 5,000 dealers and the last count I heard was 4,200. I wonder what the real number is?
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Comment by James A. Ziegler on February 20, 2012 at 11:04am
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Notice that NOBODY at Automotive news took credit for the article... no byline
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Comment by Jay Prassel on February 20, 2012 at 9:59am
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In today's Automotive News:
Autobytel boosts pay-per-sale leads TrueCar model is popular with Florida and California dealers
http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120220/RETAIL0...
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I haven't been on the blog here much in the past two weeks.... maybe everyone has seen this already.
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Comment by Keith Shetterly on February 19, 2012 at 11:57pm -
I am not waiting.
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Comment by David T. Gould on February 19, 2012 at 11:29pm
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I will be waiting with bated breathe to see who this "knight in shining armour" is going to be.
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Comment by Keith Shetterly on February 19, 2012 at 5:58pm
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Thanks Thomas. We just need an advocate in the Data Wars to apply the data on our behalf; it appears to me, and I could be wrong, that we are not going to change data aggregation soon. If that is correct, we need a partner who will help apply it across and for our business, not to strangle our future.
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