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 James A. Ziegler on January 9, 2012 at 10:25am
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Comment by Eric Damiani 1 hour agoDelete Comment
Live Event
Virginia Transportation Safety Board Meeting
Date/Time: January 9, 2012: 9 AM
Location: Department of Motor Vehicles, 2300 West Broad St., Richmond VA, 23220
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AND where in the Hell is Lexus and BMW in this equation. It seems to me the alleged Prestige and Premium Brands are sitting on their thumbs showing their inadequacy to protect their customers from TrueCar and maintain the image of their brands. Maybe in the future you'll be able to buy your BMW at Big Lots.
However weak, at least Mercedes made somewhat of a muscle.
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Comment by David T. Gould on January 9, 2012 at 10:11am
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Reading between the lines? OEM requires valid email address? Now who is the bad guy in the consumer's eye? Who gets the benefit of getting those now valid email addresses? I do not see anything that addresses the data issue.
This is another example of what I mean by TrueCar skirting around the real issue(s) to stall or pacify less informed individuals. I don't see TrueCar making any real concession here. I see this as a spin on verifying email addresses (which gives them more accurate information to cross reference) at the expense of the "OEM" requirement.
I am seeing a lot of "changes" expected to be made to TrueCar during January 2012. I suggest, investors should be wary of TrueCar and how these "changes" will effect their business model vs. prior.
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Are the people at Mercedes Benz idiots? I don't think this is the intention at all. I predict this horse crap isn't going to play well at national Headquarters, cheapening the prestigious brand.
Somebody jump in here and explain what you see here.
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Happy New Year From Mercedes Benz USA (as I posted last week before this was announced that it was coming) Change in the TrueCar format... from TrueCar. Notice the line "Due to Negative Publicity"... hey is that us?
Hello everyone and Happy New Year!
We have received numerous questions regarding advertising on TrueCar and I wanted to send you the most recent updates. Please make sure your Dealers are informed.- As a result of the negative press TrueCar has been receiving, TrueCar is working to modify their template to address the following:
1. Pricing below MSRP cannot appear in non-password protected sites prior to a consumer entering a their personal information
2. Consumer must register with a valid email address and register a password for the consumer to obtain a price quote from a dealer
a. Consumer can click through to log into TrueCar.com with their personal password once TrueCar has validated their email address.
b. Consumer can then select dealer(s) for a price quote.- TrueCar's goal is to have the new template active at the close of January 2012.
- The new template will be structured as follows:
1. Consumer-facing information appearing prior to a consumer registering with TrueCar will be:
a. The Avg. Market Transaction Price of the model selected
b. The distance in miles of the 3 closest participating dealers who have inventory of the model selected
c. A prompt stating "Register to see your price for this vehicle"
d. A prompt "Why don't we show the upfront price?" which launches a pop-up window stating that OEM programs requires consumers to register with a valid email address to receive a
price quote.
2. Clicking on "Register to see your price . . ." brings the consumer to a screen to enter personal information, including a valid email address
3. TrueCar verifies email address, allowing consumer to log into TrueCar's site with their personal password
4. Consumer can select dealer(s) from whom they would like to receive a Price Protection Certificate which guarantees the price quoted by the dealer- As of MBUSA's May 2011 communication to dealers, they could only list a vehicle @MSRP on TrueCar.com, or any non-password protected sites powered by TrueCar. As of the October 2011 revision to the T3BP, dealers can list a price below MSRPonly after a consumer has entered their personal information as the correspondence is then considered one-to-one marketing. This is all in compliance with "1A4" of the MB Brand Standards. MBCCS can commence monitoring the TrueCar listings in this regard.
- A new wrinkle in the TrueCar saga:
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Comment by Thomas A. Kelly on January 9, 2012 at 6:21am
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Entire article: http://www.autonews.com/article/20111221/PRESS_RELEASES/111229978/1447
Connect the dots.
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If I was a TrueCar Investor I'd be organizing a lynch mob to go after the people that talked me into it.
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I am curious as to what the investors are thinking right now...or do you think they don't want to see at this point in the game?
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@ Michael
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I am amazed he keeps putting out such positive fabricated interviews when, in fact TrueCar is as big a disaster as you could conjure in your worst nightmares. This guy is in a fantasy world. Has he ever realistically looked at his track record?
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