Its amazing to me how businesses like true car even exist.  They literally leech off of dealers, costing them money, to sell them their own leads while they arm them with ridiculous information to use against us.  Its a terrible cycle.  Even worse is they perpetuate the myth that there is some secret scam to just rake customers over the coals for all their money, when most of the time were merely trying to sell a car at cost.  I hate everything about this whole true car scam.

The only way we win is to generate more organic leads through our websites and through training our people to become better at handling them to close at a higher percent. 

GRASSROOTS Movement.
This morning I submitted a lead threw
un-Truthful Cars and when the dealers sent me their responses I replied
with links to Jerry's video and other threads about the dangers of True
Car. I made sure to include un-Truthful Cars legal actions to Jerry Thibeau's
video posting on You-Tube and how a company with True in their name is
afraid of the TRUTH!!!!! Hopefully they will see this as the cancer that
it is. If we do not do something about it it will metastasize.

LET"S GO PEOPLE>>>START SUBMITTING THOSE LEADS!!!!!!!!!!!

Arnold you sure have a lot of time to respond to why you don't have time to make a list of other companies for everyone ...

"If you're using TrueCar, you're a giveaway artist."  -Jerry Thibeau

If I were a fox and wanted into the chicken coop, I'd build a Trojan Horse and call myself the press.

TrueCar has registered as the press. Smart.

NADA considers TrueCar press. 

Where is NADA on this?

TrueCar has launched a TrojanHorse into it's flock,and it's NADA's job to see the TrueCar-TrainWreck and to launch a counter offensive before TrueCar litter it's board with shareholders.

...or you could look at it like.. the better the deals consumers see, the more cars they buy. The more cars consumers buy, the higher the market share for the OEM and then more inventory can be sold to the dealer.... and back to the beginning. Just another perspective. 

I don't know what a franchise agreement says so I don't know what they can and can't do with the data. Data these days gets thrown through so many routes, there's no telling which data waypoint is "sharing" it..

Dear "Guess a Lot",

Wouldn't any OEM reselling a Dealers financial transaction data to a 3rd party create franchise violations, or at least franchise litigations "(read: class action & expensive)

Would not an OEM realize that reselling this data would not increase market share? (when all OEMs are on TrueCar, then no market share leverage exists)

You don't know that I'm guessing anything.

Arnold, you gotta new nick name. Arnold "I guess a lot" Tijerina.

You presume to your readers to have inside facts, when "your lack of facts is itself a message".

He asked for a list.. Im just saying that there are a lot of companies that get that data.. the OEM being one of them. I have no idea if OEMs are providing TrueCar with data .. although it wouldn't surprise me.

No because I don't have time to sit and make a list because you disagree with me. One of the biggest companies that has your financial data is your OEM.. Just saying

Arnold, your not going to create a list of companies, because there is no list of companies.

Your words haunt you...

"because silence itself is a message"

I'm not going to create a list of companies, Joe. You may disagree with me but I stand by what I said.

This had better be a rich list Arnold... Your walking on thin ice.

Ok, then I want you to produce a list of vendors that have dealer transaction data. You write:

"Dealers have been sending their transactional and inventory data to 3rd parties for YEARS. This isn’t some new phenomenon that’s all of a sudden appearing. Everyone wants to single out TrueCar when, in fact, TrueCar is only ONE OF MANY companies that have their data"

I want you to list the MANY names of vendors that have dealers transactional data. You offered one "has been" company, Autotropolis that disappeared long ago.

From what Ive been told, HomeNet terminated its relationship with TrueCar awhile ago (I think post-AutoTrader-sale) so their software isn't even in IOL Pro anymore so they can't be getting any info from HomeNet. I dont know any more than that. I stopped working for HomeNet in Oct. 2010.

Arnold T,

Does HomeNet (HN) resell or "pass-thru" Dealer Transaction Data to any other vendor than TrueCar?

Is HN TrueCar's primary source to gain access to Dealers DMS (to those dealers that are not sourced thru HN's sales dept?

Thanks for the mention of my blog article from yesterday, whomever you are!

Try reading this: In Defense of TrueCar: http://bslashc.com/2011/11/30/in-defense-of-truecar.aspx.

November will forever register in my brain as the month of ZMOT and ZAG...  Both inspiring more opinions than any two topics I can remember... 

Eric,

I think this completely over-complicates ZMOT.

A lot of advertising / marketing concepts are developed by advertisers, not marketers. For example, Proctor & Gamble's advertising budget is larger than any single global agency. A lot of what we use today comes from companies like them - not marketers.

Take reach and frequency for example - it was not developed by an advertising agency - but a global marketer. The 'moment of truth' concept was created by Google. It was a pre-existing concept.

A global marketer developed a concept called the first moment of truth and the second moment of truth. A consumer is stimulated (not necessarily advertising), then goes to the store and interacts with the product (could be packaging like orange juice or an experience like buying a car), then purchases the product and uses it. The 'first moment of truth' concept was simply confirmation that the initial interaction with a product or service was influential - not just whether the product or service was actually effective of well received.

The ZMOT concept is that the Internet, either research or social, is a new step in the process and and has an effect on the purchase process. 

IT'S THAT SIMPLE.

What's revolutionary or BS is how influential the moment of truth is. I would assume vAuto assumes that it is. My clients who use vAuto have drastic sales improvements when they use the tool - because they become more effective at pricing their vehicles compared to others online.

AGAIN, ITS THAT SIMPLE. There's another step of the process now and depending on your industry IT CAN BE VERY INFLUENTIAL. There's a lot of research done on this (not just a concept grown to sell ads) where they hook biometric sensors up to people and measure their temps, pulses and brainwaves as they shop online and dig deep into the process.

If you read more into it, you're missing the forrest for the trees.

Eric, I'm not anti-ZMOT at all. I do think it is a little too simplistic.

As to stimulus, volumes of work have been published on the subject. Being a little factitious here but, did either ad stimulate you into a dealership? Or is it more likely that you filed away the positive thoughts you had for these cars to maybe be pulled out after you have self-identified a need for a new car? I'm asking if these external ad messages were enough to put you in-market for a vehicle. If they did you'd be the exception to the rule.

Ed, 

I thought for a moment you were channeling Larry with this article's title...I'm still a bit confused why the sudden rash of anti-ZMOT sentiment.

As for ZMOT NOT creating stimulus - I disagree with that, here's 2 examples. I saw a print ad, yes - a print ad for the new Ford Explorer. That caught my eye for whatever reason and since then, I am very interested in getting one of the new models. Also, my wife leaps out of her seat whenever the new Mercedes ads run - she loves them and that created stimulus. 

If we already knew that the average automotive shopper can be exposed to over 18 potential channels and contemplate an average of 3.8 vehicles before purchase, then why are we calling ZMOT ridiculous? Use these channels, exploit them, saturate them - do whatever you need to do to get your brand, your story & your customer's experiences out there so that is can influence other people in your markets.

Sure, the argument is made that ZMOT doesn't factor intent. Big deal. Get your message out there every single day and you'll just become a machine.

This is simply a pretty way of describing the concept; Google is great at doing that: Come up with a sticky acronym, dress it up with pretty colors and make the content available to everyone in the universe via a free eBook. 

I do agree 100% Ed, if anything, ZMOT should be used as a tool to create the onboarding needed at the staff level to ensure the experience and process don't misfire. Doing so will simply create even more ZMOT opportunities.