I am a GM owner. I bought a Chevy, partly because my Dzedo worked for them practically his whole life, and partly because I got a good deal.
Why would I ever buy a GM again? Why would anyone buy a GM?
They have one of the toughest tracks back to significance ahead of them. The people that buy their cars "bailed" them out 6 months ago, now they are bankrupt. Thats left a rather bitter taste in their mouth I'd say.
They probably have the worst vision of any car company ever, partly because they are locked in to certain things by their unions, and i'm guessing a huge part is poor management. Why have they not changed their course of action? Stop selling trucks, suvs, high gas-guzzling vehicles! Okay maybe not all of them, but start focusing on what people want now, anticipate the future. Smaller, economical, greener. Easy buzzwords and it doesn't take a genius to recognize that. So what does GM do? They flash around the Chevy Volt, an electric car that has style and looks groundbreaking. And they flash it some more, then a little more, and finally a little more. Where is the Volt???? Make it a priority to get that car on the road! Can you imagine the impact/goodwill you would get by being that first major car company to roll out an electric vehicle? Nope, they will just continue to tease and annoy their customers with it.
Everybody is getting frustrated by this GM saga and the ridiculous deal the unions have been able to manage over the years is completely absurd and coming to the forefront nowadays. Isn't it time the union members go to their leaders and say...."Uh, i'd like to keep my job why don't we roll back salaries to a reasonable level?" Never going to happen I realize.
Joseph Jaffe also made a similar post ranting about GM's timing of their new commercial (commerical can be viewed by clicking the link) and got some serious response from GMs guys pretty quickly, although the GM posters were taking it much much much to personally. Makes for good reading though. I think Christopher Barger (GMs director of Social Media) made the right decision in inviting Jaffe to join Fritz on Thursday, but at the same time he came off as an arrogant dick.
This is the kind of attitude that wanes a lot of my motivation to buy GM again, they think they are ENTITLED to us buying cars from them because they are a large employer and have been around for so long, whereas they should be working their asses off to prove to us why we should support such an obvious collasal failure. Maybe this is their starting point though.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
Hi Dave - just caught your post. Sorry to hear that I came off arrogantly. I'd ask you to understand the context; we were trying to talk to literally thousands of people this past week, answer any questions they had, be as open as we could. We didn't get to everybody, but we did what I thought was a pretty good job of being out there.
In the middle of that, I saw a comment from Joe to the effect that I had never so much as responded to any of his posts, podcasts, etc. - so how serious could GM really be about being involved in the social web? Given that my team and I had at that point worked about 50 of the previous 60 or so hours trying to be out there and talking with people, I was bothered by the implication that because I hadn't talked with ONE particular person our efforts didn't count. (Not saying that this is what Joe meant... but at that sleep-deprived stage of an incredibly stressful week, that's how it came off to me.) And so that's kind of where my head was when I replied. Maybe not my finest hour, but after putting in 17 hours Sunday, 18 Monday, and another 13 Tuesday by that point, I'd beg your indulgence if I was a little snippy.
I can assure you that GM does not feel entitled to your business. We don't feel like anyone is or should be an automatic customer. We know we need to earn every single customer -- whether long-time customers or those who were let down by our vehicles in the past and have sworn off of us as a result. You could be forgiven for thinking it a PR line, but it's the honest truth: we know that especially in this environment we need to prove ourselves to customers every day.
It can be a little frustrating to see broad swaths of people refusing to listen to firms like JD Power (I've actually seen plenty of comments to the effect of, 'when Lexus wins quality awards it's legit, but when Buick wins JD Power's quality awards GM must have paid them off'), or still insisting in believing urban myths about our labor costs, etc. -- and maybe sometimes that frustration comes across from us too. But, over the past 30 years or so, I suppose we earned that level of mistrust and we'll have to just suck it up and earn it back in the other direction.
Anyway, I happened to catch your post today and wanted to assure you that I am neither arrogant nor a dick. Wrong sometimes, maybe, but neither of those. If you're interested in keeping a conversation going, please feel free to email me any time.
Have a great weekend.
Christopher Barger
Thanks for your response Christopher. I must say you are doing a rather thorough job of hunting through the social media as you are only the second commenter EVER on my blog. So you deserve some kind of reward for that also.
I understand the hours that you work and I am willing to take back my arrogance and dick comments.
However, I still feel the same way about GM. Parts of it probably have to do with the union that feels they are entitled to all this money. I understand they have made concessions....but you may end up with no job, why not take a major slash and attempt to keep everyones job that way. Sadly this will never happen in a union culture.
Thanks for your response and good luck with the challenges ahead.
Post a Comment