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 Keith Shetterly on February 17, 2012 at 3:06pm -
So, for an example of the power of data aggregation . . . see http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figur...
. . . and imagine the name of the article: "How XYZ Figured Out the Customer was Shopping for a Car Before the Dealership Did and How XYZ Stole the Sale."
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Comment by Michael Timmons on February 17, 2012 at 11:54am
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@ Jim..Personally, we are on different sides of this issue but I am hoping that with your feedback and industry input, I can be a "fixer" for TRUECar. I believe in the company and know that it can be a great resource for consumers and dealers (or I would work somewhere else). I have stated before that TC has made many mistakes and certainly the dealers need to continue to voice their concerns. With that said, TRUECar is listening and has made dramatic changes to the algorithm used to distribute leads that doesn't reward the lowest priced dealers. We have addressed the data issues and will continue to evaluate how we can better support the industry.
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Comment by Larry Bruce on February 17, 2012 at 11:49am
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@Michael I will tell you the same thing I told my good friend Charles Kim:
All transaction data comes from the DMS, whether you do the pulling it or not. Saying "WE DO NOT PULL TRANSACTION DATA from our dealers DMS" is like saying "WE DIDN"T BUILD THE NUCLEAR MISSILE we just pushed the button"
You'd be better off saving the money your are spending to buy the Transaction data and just telling your dealer your going to use theirs, they believe you are doing that anyway.
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Comment by George O'Sullivan on February 17, 2012 at 11:47am
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@Michael the fact that you failed to address ANY of the important issues I addressed, and instead answer a rhetorical point, shows that you are not serious. Once again I am disappointed by your company. I am sure you fit in well.
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Comment by Keith Shetterly on February 17, 2012 at 11:44am
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I'm on a data aggregation exercise. Given only an email address and a false name, for example, what could I find out? Just want to see if my manual process could produce (with what difficulty) what an automated process could, one that is perhaps used by "data aggregators" . . . ahem. Anyway...
So, I had an email address to start of someone harassing me here. NOT saying I did this, necessarily, but theoretically let's say I was able to track that email address to a person--and I have their name, their birth date, their spouse's name and DOB, their income level, their likes/dislikes, their family and relatives, their employment, their education, their religious beliefs, their other emails, their heritage, their buying habits, and . . . the actual relationship of their life to the auto business that prompted their harassment (which made it all make sense). This just came together today, theoretically. What would I theoretically do with this information?
At most, I'd out the relationship that prompted the harassment. Regardless, this theory . . . makes a good set of questions of its own. Many thanks to Thomas Kelly for pointing out how "anonymized" (PII-stripped) info can be "non-anonymized", which got me thinking on all this--since I've been around this computer "stuff" since 1983, what would I be able to produce?
So, now, imagine a data warehouse across all the states. What could be done with that information? Automatically? And that would be reality, not theory.
Thanks!
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Comment by Thomas A. Kelly on February 17, 2012 at 11:35am
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Michael said in part.....
".........we credit back a portion of the subscription fee if the dealer's conversion rate is lower than planned ....."
Slippery slope?....So there WILL be retro considerations....and fees adjusted accordingly? Virginia panel member said it best...."if it walks like a duck....."
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@George
Does your third party service take notice when the customers were already in the DMS, prior to recieving the lead from TrueCar? No, as I am sure you are aware, leads are sent to our dealers CRM systems that assist sales associates in managing the sales process. This is where the duplicity of leads occurs and generally not in the DMS until the sale of the vehicle. I do not know of a company that reconciles both systems.
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@Larry Dealers that are on a subscription model do have a choice of providing DMS access or not. Depending on the laws of the state, we credit back a portion of the subscription fee if the dealer's conversion rate is lower than planned or TC didn't provide the number of expected leads. The DMS access allows TC to validate sales and credit back fees to our dealers. This makes the reconciliation process easy for our dealers. We DO NOT pull transaction data from our dealers DMS.
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Comment by Keith Shetterly on February 17, 2012 at 7:35am
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Ha! Thomas, that is funny. No, that's not who I was referring to. That other Ferreira isn't that smart. :)
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@ Keith...??
Marco A.R Ferreira, co-authored "Multiscale Modeling"
This "Ferreira", (university professor) seems to be an expert on aggregating data and creating a picture that is bigger than the sum of all it's parts.
Taken from reveiw:
"A wide variety of processes occur on multiple scales, either naturally or as a consequence of measurement. This book contains methodology for the analysis of data that arise from such multiscale processes. The book brings together a number of recent developments and makes them accessible to a wider audience. Taking a Bayesian approach allows for full accounting of uncertainty, and also addresses the delicate issue of uncertainty at multiple scales. The Bayesian approach also facilitates the use of knowledge from prior experience or data, and these methods can handle different amounts of prior knowledge at different scales, as often occurs in practice."
This person may not be who you are referring to but it sure is relevant, good reading. It is like 2+2 = 5
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