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 David T. Gould on February 8, 2012 at 10:23am
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Scott Painter states: "Look, I realize that some people feel, because of my past at Cars-Direct, that this is an anti-dealer play. It’s not. This is about fundamentally recognizing that the consumer has changed how they shop, and we believe that this is one of the most important tools for dealership profitability and growth in the future." reprinted from... http://www.fi-magazine.com/Article/Story/2012/02/Under-Fire/Page/2....
My question Mr. Painter, Have people fundamentally changed how they shop? The internet has been here for years. Is it the consumer crying out for your solution? OR Is it your most profitable business plan. Either way, TrueCar is NOT "one of the most important tools for dealership profitability and growth in the future"... it is the faster route to the bottom possible with growth for dealers being the last thing you would ever care about.
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Comment by James A. Ziegler on February 8, 2012 at 10:16am
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Got to agree with you David, there is much trickery in contractual language... we need to put these vendors on notice, get out...or get out...your choice.
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@Larry. I am not so sure dealers brought this on themselves. Fine print data acquisition clauses tucked into unrelated vendor software offerings does not warrant bringing it on themselves to me. They were and are being hoodwicked. Jim and gang here have exposed this so now they should be able to take action.
Do you see the viability of just Locking Down specific fields verses the costs and effort of writing and enforcing data agreements, utilizing another third party to do their job or worst option, cutting off all access to DMS which would greatly reduce dealership data mining inefficiencies?
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A letter I just received from an extremely successful large dealer...
Let’s not forget Ad agencies and direct mail companies that that dealers allow access to owner files to do various campaigns, only to have them reuse and or sell the data to the dealer down the street. Some F&I venders are suspect as well. Written agreements" to not share" data mean nothing. They all will either deny or blame some “low level former employee “after the damage is done. When the last time was a dealer received damage compensation from a vender that shared data? My guess is never . And if you ever did successfully pursue one of these parties,at the end they would be probably be bankrupt anyway.
Thanks for everything you do!
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Scott Painter responds:
F&I's question: You’ve said your DMS data pull is not used to fuel your market transaction curves. So, where do you get that data?
Painter: We buy what is called anonymized flat-file data from numerous providers. We see more than 90 percent of all transactions, new and used, in the United States. And we’re not tracking that data for anything other than aggregated data analysis about what people paid.
F&I: How strong is that price protection certificate you offer car buyers?
Painter: Nobody is tricking us. We see the data. If a customer got a price certificate and paid a higher price, we see it.
What is it Scott? Do you buy it? OR Do you "see it" without paying for it and not repurpose?
Reading on here http://www.fi-magazine.com/Article/Story/2012/02/Under-Fire/Page/2.... you can see how the All Knowing and All Knowing Wizard of Painter is going to punish the bad dealers who don't see things his way.
Yes, I am off from work this morning.
Yes, this is my RANT.
Yes, I am upset.
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Scott Painter states: "The Internet and the industry get an A-plus for distributing product information, but the role of the salesperson, as a result, is different." from http://www.fi-magazine.com/Article/Story/2012/02/Under-Fire/Page/2....
@Scott Painter... (I know your not here, but this will make me feel a little better) You arrogant SOB. After all the backlash you and your company TrueCar received over these past months... How is the role of the salesperson different? You still see a carsalesperson's role as menial and replaceable by the internet. My Customer Service Index is 98.1%... I have (proudly) sold hundreds of new toyotas with and without your "TrueCar" solution and can confidently say that there was only one client that I can honestly recall that came in, presented their price quote and bought the car straight out. For the rest, your product only raised confusion, wasted time for the consumer, as well as the dealer, and did not change final cost of the consumers purchase. I don't get how you are not being sued by investors for deliberately tanking their investments dollars.
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Comment by Larry Bruce on February 8, 2012 at 9:41am -
To all dealers that are reading this thread:
ADP (DMI) and Reynolds (RCI) are the most secure ways to get your DMS data where you want it to go. That being said, I also think Authenticom does a really good job and has no ill intentions with the data.BUT...
That doesn't mean that you just trust that your data is being handled properly. The easiest way to cure this is to ask each provider that needs to access your DMS or any data from your dealership (website etc) to sign a data sharing agreement that outlines your rules for your data and also have a data sharing agreement that they need to get signed by their polling provider (DMI, RCI or Authenticom etc.) to sign as well.
Eventually the only way to manage all of these different agreements will be just to not share the data with anyone outside the dealership at all and every dealer is OK with that, hell that is what we thought was happening in the first place.
If you continue to operate with vendors in your DMS or any other data off of your website etc. without a data sharing agreement on your side signed by all that have access to the data well then don't be surprised if your data is all over AND DON'T BITCH, you brought it on yourself.
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Scott Painter states: "We do know who they are down to their telephone number and address. That’s because we’re tracking them after they contact the dealer [who is] using our service as part of our performance-based billing model." from http://www.fi-magazine.com/Article/Story/2012/02/Under-Fire/Page/2....
PURE HORSE #@$&, TrueCar acknowledges and does sell leads that include name, address, phone number and more to third party providers that are then distributed to dealers they say are in areas they do not cover. I don't believe them on that either.
This article needs to saved reviewed, statement by statement and broken down for the nonsense it spews. Highly disappointing start to this morning.
Thank you Mr Painter for exposing yourself and your company TrueCar (which is now extended into Cars.com, Yahooautos.com, auto manufacturer, affiliates / partnerships and more...for what they are... NOT CHANGED... THE SAME.
Data War is here... Lock'm Down. Individual parts of dealership / consumer data (fields) can be restricted(removed) from dms polling / outside access. Lock those fields down to put an end to your exposure in the Data War.
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Comment by Randy Fry on February 8, 2012 at 9:26am
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Jim... it is not time to retire my friend... http://www.fi-magazine.com/Article/Story/2012/02/Under-Fire/Page/2.... is a February 2012 publication. This article painfully shows Mr. Painter has not learned a thing.
@Michael Timmons, there are statements in this article that are outright lies. I was hopeful that progress was being made. Highly, disappointing.
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