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 January 14, 2012 at 2:35pm
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The world of automotive vendors is very incestuous....always has been, but is certainly getting worse.
Love the picture by Tom of Jim & Keith.
Regaring the articles below.....Remember too that Homenet was aquired by AutoTraderATLANTA, Dec. 24, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- AutoTrader.com, the Internet's leading automotive marketplace and consumer information website, announced today the completion of its transaction to acquire the assets of HomeNet Automotive, a leading provider of online inventory management and merchandising solutions for the automotive retail industry.
AutoTrader.com's purchase of HomeNet's assets will bring a variety of benefits to dealers who post vehicles for sale on AutoTrader.com and to car shoppers who use AutoTrader.com to research and compare vehicles, find dealer specials, review inventory of cars for sale and select dealerships to visit.
For dealers, incorporating HomeNet's proprietary inventory management system into AutoTrader.com's dealer tools will allow for easier and faster inventory management and merchandising online. Consumers shopping for vehicles on AutoTrader.com will have access to better vehicle information, enhanced listings that include more photos and dealer comments, advanced search capabilities and more frequent updates and information about the cars they are shopping for and researching.
The closing of the HomeNet purchase is the third in a series of acquisitions AutoTrader.com has announced in recent months. In September, AutoTrader.com announced the purchase of vAuto, the automotive retail industry's leading provider of advanced software tools for used vehicle management, pricing and inventory optimization. In October, AutoTrader.com announced its acquisition of Kelley Blue Book (www.kbb.com), one of the most recognized and influential brands in the automotive industry. All three purchases have now closed.
"With the closing of the HomeNet acquisition, AutoTrader.com has brought together an amazing set of companies, people and automotive marketing and merchandising solutions under one roof," said AutoTrader.com President and CEO Chip Perry. "We look forward to the next stage of our evolution as we work to continue serving auto manufacturers, auto dealers and auto shoppers through AutoTrader.com and these three outstanding companies."
The HomeNet assets will be acquired by a newly formed wholly-owned subsidiary of AutoTrader.com.
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Comment by Keith Shetterly on January 14, 2012 at 10:05am -
@ Stanley: Ha!! You crack me up, and that's a great point. Thanks Jim for this blog!!!!!! And all your hard work.
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Comment by Stanley Esposito on January 14, 2012 at 9:48am
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@Chintan Talati The apology should be for truecar in general. What a public relations disaster. It seems to me that the only regrets truecar has is that Jim Ziegler decided to write a small blog asking the dealers to look into truecar and Zag.
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Comment by Thomas A. Kelly on January 14, 2012 at 8:48am
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Without question James!....Keep kicking butt!
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Comment by James A. Ziegler on January 14, 2012 at 8:43am
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30,000 Page Views on this Blog, some kind of milestone would you say?
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Post from ADM, 1-13-12:
Comment by Chintan Talati 18 hours ago
In response to Thomas A. Kelly's open letter to Steven Hansen:
"Today, TrueCar learned that as a result of unsanctioned behavior on the company's behalf, several domains were registered that are inconsistent with TrueCar's brand, values and commitments to our dealer partners. TrueCar apologizes for this. The company is taking immediate steps to respond including de-registration of these domain names."
The ONLY commitment they have with dealer "partners" is to reduce their numbers substantially and eliminate salespersons as we know them today.....I maintain that the purchase of the classless domains is TOTALLY CONSISTENT with TrueCars brand and values.
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Stephen has a hard time distancing himself from the purchase of the classless URLs
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David, Dealix is reselling TrueCar leads I assume because TrueCar doesn't have coverage to refer to a dealer or are not operating (any longer) in the states the leads originated maybe. After talking top mark Reuss, president of General Motors, he assured me they were not buying leads from TrueCar, then after further investigation, it occurred to me that GM was buying leads from Dealix... maybe that's how the TrueCar logo ended up on GM Leads.
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Comment by David T. Gould on January 13, 2012 at 5:58pm
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Is TrueCar backdooring leads through Dealix?
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