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 December 21, 2011 at 10:49am
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Be looking for some big news about TrueCar in the next couple of days.... remember I said this
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Comment by Thomas A. Kelly on December 21, 2011 at 7:30am
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Painter, the man = epitome of duplicitous behavior? I keep my dogs on my side of the fence with shock collars, after all, I feed them.
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So Painter builds Carsdirect in 1998, Penske invests in 2000 and takes a position on its board,Painter sells Carsdirect, it becomes InternetBrands, Fast forward a couple of years, Painter's TC/Zag partners with DealerTrack who now partners with InternetBrands to form Chrome Data Solutions (Damond Decker post on AMD: http://www.automotivedigitalmarketing.com/profiles/blog/show?id=197...
.....Am I getting this right? It would be enlightening to see Painter & Co. on a graph, a visual aid so the brain does not have to work so hard to follow the money and more easily understand who the wolves are.
Here is a start
Painter says. "Buying a car should be more transparent. You don't have to trust the dealer anymore -- trust the data."
Painter = CarsDirect = InterentBrands>
DealerTrack/InternetBrands = Chrome Data Solutions
Painter = TC/Zag = DealerTrack>
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Comment by Chris Saraceno on December 20, 2011 at 8:36pm
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100 pages of Comments and 21,714 views. The World Record for Views on an Automotive Social Site keeps growing. Do you think it has a chance of 30,000 views?
Continue to send the dE link of this post
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Comment by Joe Clementi on December 20, 2011 at 7:29pm
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Just heard from a very reliable source that CA has put in motion the steps necessary to close TC. As we've stated multiple times, the very advertising that they use is demed illegal in our state. Why it took so long to start this process is beyond your average Joe! One small step for the little dealer...one giant leap for every dealer!
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Comment by Keith Shetterly on December 20, 2011 at 6:27pm -
I added mine, too. I'm "KeithInHou" since they can't accept my long name. Here's what I wrote: "Painter's only transparency is consumer-facing. To dealers, whom he relies on, he has repurposed sales data to push pricing in a direction that allows him to dominate the market. It's not about consumers, and it's not about dealers (for sure). It's about taking sales data and repurposing it against his dealer clients. To dealers who use TrueCar, it's like selling both your kidneys: Short-term gain for long-term extinction. Dealers don't need TrueCar, and neither do consumers. Modernization of dealers is much needed--and cars are NOT commodities. Painter just admitted that in a call with me last Friday!! You know what his REAL commodities are in this process: CONSUMERS. You're just a number, punched in for his profit, never explaining that dealers PAY him $300-$400 a car to make it "free" for consumers. A few of these a month to a dealer is like lazy waves at knee height on a beach--across thousands of dealers, it's a TSUNAMI. And that's destructive for everybody, dealers and consumers alike."
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Comment by Jim Kristoff on December 20, 2011 at 6:12pm
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Added my $.02 on the CNN article.....
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Comment by Keith Shetterly on December 20, 2011 at 5:58pm
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@ Bryan: Kinda' funny about that data, huh?
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Comment by bryan w shufelt on December 20, 2011 at 5:37pm
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TrueCar is a free online service that tracks actual purchases of new cars. Unlike other car sites, it collects information from various sources in the transaction process: insurers, lenders, government records, and the 5,400 brick-and-mortar dealers in 49 states that participate in TrueCar's network. From these data, TrueCar determines average prices for any model in a given area in the past month......................I thought Painter said they did not get data from dealers?????????????????
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Hey go read the Cnn Money article and look at the comments below where I posted right on the article.
Taken from Cnn Money Magazine article today
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