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
-
Comment by David T. Gould on January 12, 2012 at 10:20am
-
@ Jim, customer data privacy remains the main issue here. Brokering and Advertising issues will get resolved with tweaks to TrueCar's business plan. Take away the data and TrueCar (and the like) falls. Keep up the good fight!
-
Comment by James A. Ziegler on January 12, 2012 at 10:13am
-
Let's put all vendors on notice. 2012 is the Year of the Dealer Data Reclamation. If a vendor doesn't like the new rules, no matter how big and important you think you might be, if you don't like the new rules, you're outta here because we'll fire your ass.
-
-
Are you people slap-ass crazy? Almost every vendor is stealing your customer identifiable Data and passing it around to their afiliated companies and selling it on the open market... and you signed off on it. When the lawsuits come...and they will come... it was your dealership that handed the customer the privacy statement...and it will be your dealership that falls.
-
-
WE know the states are too smart to let them back door with reverse math like they tried in Virginia....
-
Comment by Thomas A. Kelly on January 12, 2012 at 8:48am
-
I would be willing to bet that somehow, someway they will attempt to tie the "flat fee" to leads or sales or both with a back door mathematical algorithm....like, at the end of the quarter, adjust flat fee for the next quarter....and magically if you divide the units by the flat fee for the previous quarter...bingo! 300-400 bucks per pop....I expect them to take at least one more swing at deception on this issue. Chumps are so predictable.
"Bruce Gould, executive director of the Virginia Motor Vehicle Dealer Board, said in an e-mail today that TrueCar “should be OK” on the pricing issue as long as its new subscription model complies with Virginia’s payment guidelines for lead generators. The payment essentially has to be a flat amount, not tied to a sale or referral."
-
Comment by Stick Bogart on January 11, 2012 at 7:38pm -
I have access to one that's FAT that they do not have.. it would be a sweet web site. it could be used as a complaint board
-
Comment by David Blassingame on January 11, 2012 at 7:20pm
-
Heather, Send it here.
-
Comment by Stick Bogart on January 11, 2012 at 7:18pm
-
I can buy one they do NOT own..
-
Comment by Stick Bogart on January 11, 2012 at 7:16pm
-
Guess who owns www.TruecarRipOff.com ?
-
Comment by Heather Graham on January 11, 2012 at 7:09pm
-
Keith & David - I will send you the info that Zag recently sent me in regards to what they pull. The orginal contract was a few sentences and it did not outline exactly what they would be pulling (although it was open by design I assume). I do remember we had many discussions with our Zag rep at the time of contract signing regarding their access to our DMS. I will have to see if I have any correspondence from back then. As for what was pulled out of our systems, I don't have exact info yet, but I've been told there were many different reports.
David - what email shall I send it to?
© 2024 Created by DealerELITE.
Powered by
You need to be a member of DealerELITE.net to add comments!
Join DealerELITE.net