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 Keith Shetterly on December 27, 2011 at 1:08pm -
Interesting interview showing more of the stripes, yet again. We're liars, because dealers have to answer the question "Is Truth profitable?". And so on. Interesting take on franchise laws. Great question about his attitude about being "consumer protection" or not. Typical slack answer.
http://www.5min.com/Video/Performance-Based-Marketing-259781669
Huh. Scott Painter is also the co-founder of US Digital Gaming (online gambling). I'm getting dizzy.
-
Comment by James A. Ziegler on December 27, 2011 at 12:43pm
-
You know Stan I did discuss that with Mark Reuss last week, and anytime I speak with Factory Executives, I never make the conversation public. That is how I keep their trust. JIM
-
Comment by Stanley Esposito on December 27, 2011 at 12:19pm
-
@Jim
Did Mark Reuss regret taking the ZR-1 to Painter as much as Painter regrets we all know what he thinks of us?
-
Comment by Al Mosher on December 27, 2011 at 11:58am
-
Not just rain....it's Hurricane Alpha Dawg about to hit!!!
-
-
We've already got some serious rain in the works on that Randy, watch what's about to happen.
-
Comment by Randy Fry on December 27, 2011 at 11:51am
-
i went from the GRP partners site to the news section, and went down and read the sept news about Truecar and their upcoming IPO
you all might just rain on their parade there
-
Comment by Keith Shetterly on December 27, 2011 at 11:47am
-
@ Jim: Good! Thank you!!
-
-
Just had a chat with Mark Reuss, President of General Motors... sent him a copy of the 2009 Painter video...
-
Comment by Keith Shetterly on December 27, 2011 at 10:08am
-
Scott Painter in a 2009 interview tells you more about his views on bankruptcy reducing the number of unnecessary dealers, his love of one-way transparency, that great up-front price. If you still support TrueCar after listening to this, good luck to you as a dealer--you're going to need it.
http://vator.tv/news/2009-04-06-bankruptcy-would-be-good-for-car-ma...
Just one of the Q&A's:
"BF: Your bet is that with services like yours, more dealerships will go out of business?
SP: Well I actually look at it the other way. The dealerships we partner with will thrive. So if you really look at the dealership landscape really look like? I'm from LA but we've got over 200 Ford stores in southern California all selling the same certain brands. There are 60 Toyota stores. The paragon of efficiency. I don't know how many stores you need but it is probably closer to nine. I mean that would give you a Toyota store that would be very convenient for your location and at the same time you wouldn't have competition between the dealers. You would have much more efficient showrooms, much more efficient lots, and you would have a much better margin for the dealer. So I think there has to be a real alignment of the entire business. There has to be pain. Some dealers are going to get out of the business and some dealers will remain to survive. I do believe that we are one of the companies who happens to be in an exciting spot to control the customer at the beginning of the conversation as opposed to waiting for them to walk in the door."
Many thanks to the ADM member who shared this with me in email!
-
-
Has anybody besides me noticed that GRP Partners have dramatically de-emphasized TrueCar on their website pages over the last week, almost to the point of barely mentioning TrueCar and apparently hiding their logo at the bottom of the page beneath the fold... when it seems like just a week or so ago, it was overwhelmingly touting TrueCar? They seem to have went FROM BOLD PRINT front and center...to a mere "Also Mentioned".
I think these guys might possibly be a bit embarrassed they raised so much money and led trusting investors to put their money into this ongoing "Train Wreck". I think GPR Partners is feeling a bit foolish (deservedly so?) That's just me thinking out loud and I could be totally off track and mistaken. BUT, it sure appears to me they could conceivably be distancing themselves from TrueCar and the obviously distinct appearance of buffoonery from a company that evidently never did their homework on dealers and state laws (federal laws?)
Look at the GRP Partners Website http://www.grppartners.com/ Of course, as always, make your own judgments, I could be wrong. JIM
© 2024 Created by DealerELITE.
Powered by
You need to be a member of DealerELITE.net to add comments!
Join DealerELITE.net