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 9, 2011 at 9:41am
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I would like to appeal to everyone on this Blog to continually repost the Video of Scott Painter of TrueCar laying out his plan to destroy the current retail model and what he does with dealer data. Keep putting it back at the top of the page as it moves way down. We have a lot of new people coming to read this and they need to see it.
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The TrueCar Propaganda team working overtime to distract and talk us down, misdirect the conversation away from glaring facts. Comparing themselves to a "Lead Provider"
THEY ARE NOT A LEAD PROVIDER
They are delivering deals already pre-negotiated (against the dealers BY THEM for a fee).
It seems to me they are acting as Brokers and I am finding out several State Attorneys General (especially in California) might conceivably agree that there are several potential violations of states and federal laws that I believe might stand deeper investigation.
I haven't posted much since I started these blogs because I have been working hard behind the scenes. I have visited with several manufacturers executives at the highest levels and there may be some additional surprises coming... I have already been effective in educating.
I know TrueCar and Mr. Kim have been lobbying every visible figure in the Industry for support and The Couple Alleged Big Fish they've snagged are making it abundantly clear they haven't got a clue as to what's going here...or as Andrea Mussleman alludes... maybe it's worth their while to support the opposing team.
The smokescreens TrueCar commandos keep throwing up are designed to do several things
* keep moving other people's comments down the screen and off of the first page
*keep moving the smoking gun video off the front page of Scott Painter arrogantly laying out his plan to destroy the retail model and replace it with his (highly profitable to TrueCar) model and how he uses the dealers DMS data extracted. I wonder how much Federal privacy violation a deep investigation would uncover? I might be wrong but I'm tending to believe otherwise.
*Distract from the fact that so many dealers are reporting "Deals That Can't Be Done" That's reality.
*With their IPO looming it is good to get information to Wall Street and let potential investors, wherever they may be, know about the huge revolution from dealers that is swelling and the pushback from many dealers and , now, some manufacturers.
*AND Finally, there are conflicting conversations as to what and how much consumer information is being siphoned out of dealers' DMS by there people and what purpose. That alone should be investigated by government agencies.
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Comment by Lawrence Malkin on December 9, 2011 at 9:23am
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Where is the personal touch from( true car) that a salesman can give the customer? Is some internet site going to give hands on training? is some computer going to spend time delivering the vehicle to the customer? Is the customer going to get a follow up call from a computer generated voice or a live person that can interact with the customer ummm makes me wonder....
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Comment by Jerry Thibeau on December 8, 2011 at 6:04pm
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Done! It's under the Grant video where it belongs. Grant Video!
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Comment by DealerELITE on December 8, 2011 at 5:30pm
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Jerry post the message to Grant here also, your dE members want to read this also
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You guys will love this. Had to post it on DR since we need to rattle the cages of some people over there.
http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f43/earth-grant-2261.html#post19567
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Comment by Larry Muirhead on December 8, 2011 at 5:15pm
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The last two customers we had here in our showroom, who in the past may have purchased a vehicle, told us they will go home to print their Zag/Truecar info. Nice huh!
Merry Christmas.
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Comment by Pete Obuchon on December 8, 2011 at 5:07pm
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I still think that a consumer group is going to get hold of this and hang some dealer for selling their info without consent...
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5 Years ago we had a dealer group move in to the area up here and they started mailing out fliers with below invoice pricing. What that did to our market up here in northern Vermont was bring customers out to shop. We had a record amount of activity that year and every year since because they drove more customers into the market and stirred up business. About 30% of our walk-in traffic came in with their ad asking us to match their pricing. Most customers were realistic when we explained what was going on and what was going to happen when they got there. Those that didn't believe us ended up going down there and got a little battered and bruised. Even if we didn't get that deal, we got the next one and we got their friends and family. Soon their reputation was bad enough that nobody even believed their ads and they stopped mailing them. If history repeats itself, the same will happen to Truecar. I have been out of the metro Boston market for a while but I can only assume that the same thing will happen. Dealers will stop honoring the quotes and the customer won't believe their pricing. Just curious, what was your closing ratio on those leads and did you make money with it?
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If Manufacturers drop ZAG and TrueCar that would be the right move.
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