GM’s new ad campaign, featuring Chairman Ed Whitacre, centers around the catchphrase “may the best car win.” According to the New York Times, the lure to new buyers will be a 60-day refund on any new GM product. In short, the perfect way to remind shoppers that buyer’s remorse comes standard on most GM vehicles. But that’s not even the craziest part of GM’s latest bid for consideration. To find out more, let’s just surf over to maythebestcarwin.com . . .
Oops! The site, name and branding concept behind GM’s next big marketing thing has already been taken! By Yamaha! For a golf car(t)! Bold Moves!
Seriously though, where can we learn more about why choosy consumers should choose The General? It’s actually thebestcarwins.com. Once you’re there, feel free to fill out your own opinion about which brands are the best at various metrics (e.g., efficiency, safety, quality, etc). And when you’re done, you can see the top-ranked brands based on visitor selections. Surprise! None of them are GM brands. Congratulations, General Motors, you’re doing a fine job advertising for the competition.
Wow. Epic, Epic fail for GM.
One question – would GM even make the top 5 in any of those categories?
Yeeesh. The questions could at least be slanted in GMs direction.
One of the question is who makes the best performance cars? If you asked who made the best performance car (singular), I’d probably pick the Corvette. If you ask about the best performance cars, I take that to mean multiple models and start thinking Lotus or BMW or Ferarri or something.
Hey GM: The best cars are already winning.
My votes: Fiat, Volvo, Toyota, Lotus, Lexus… in that order, and without much analysis on my part.
Appropriately enough this ad showed up on the ttac site next to the article.
My choices didn’t match anything other people picked except quality/fuel efficiency.
I see people abusing this as “2 month rentals, for free!”
If gm only hadn’t taken bailout dollars, I’d probably give them a look.
This is definately something they need to do and IMHO quite ballsy, however they should make it 6 months.
Also: What is the small print? If I do 10k miles in 2 months, are they still giving me a refund? What if I’m too dumb to change the oil or do maintenance during that 2 months and the car falls apart/engine blows up — do I still get a refund?
What if I PAY for maintenance to maintain the car — at the end of 2 months, do I get my maint $ back as well?
I was reading the 2009 Consumer Reports buying guide last night. In their used car chapter, they have a special “Worst of the Worst” which lists the 30 or so worst used cars.
19 are GM
4 are Volkswagon
3 are Chrysler
2 Nissan
1 Kia
1 Land Rover
1 Ford
1 Mercedes
In the same chapter, they have about 40 “Best of the Best”. GM has only 2 cars on that list.
There you go GM. That is your problem all printed in one place. How is your advertising going overcome that hard reality that so many of your cars don’t age worth a damn. That is why you have to discount them to get people to buy them.
It’s about time for another public haranguing of GM’s eBay feedback rating… Sneak peek: It hasn’t gotten better.
I went through and selected SAAB for all of them except safety and quality (Volvo, and for the fun of it, Volvo – at least it used to be true) just to spite GM.
How can they possibly be so stupid?
Oh, yeah. It does not matter much whether they do sell cars or not. What’s important is that taxpayers give them $100,000,000,000.00. For free.
Yipeee!
The path of least resistance today when buying a new car is to walk into any Honda or Toyota dealership, pick the one you want, and drive it away. Four other Asian “imports” are nearly so.
It has been at least a generation since you could say that about General Motors.
I suppose that the surprise reveal is going to be based on assertions that GM sweeps all the categories. They will probably cherry pick data and methodologies to try and prove that point.
Lame.
Does GM have a bunch of cars that no one knows about that can beat the living daylights out of the competition that they are going to reveal on Sept. 13? I don’t think so.
Note to Toyota: Watch your step or you will be following in GM’s footsteps. Good FE or not.
Note to Volvo: Everybody thinks you are the safest car. Get back to your roots. You used to be affordable too. Again get back to you roots.
Note to Honda: Everybody thinks you have highest quality. Keep it up and reach beyond expectations.
Note to Audi: Step it up to beat BMW as the best performance cars.
BMW: proceed as normal
I suppose that the surprise reveal is going to be based on assertions that GM sweeps all the categories. They will probably cherry pick data and methodologies to try and prove that point.
LOL at probably.
Why is Ferrari on there? What car from GM competes with a car from Ferrari? Vett, you can argue on some levels, but with the price difference, you really don’t have any cross shoppers.
I’m going to bet that they will try to comb through the numbers and say they beat X in safety or Y in performance, if the numbers come out in their favor. They may have beat Ferrari in “the best” car category, simply because there will be so many GM loyalists and buyers and Ferrari is simply not in the general public’s mind when thinking about buying a car. So they can say that more people think they are a better car company than Ferrari, or that they can say they beat Land Rover in quality (I don’t even remember if Land Rover was in the list, but as an example, this will do). But what relevance is that?
Edit: also, except Infinity and Acura, I don’t think the Japanese brands have much to worry about, this is a senseless cherry picking contest, but it could fool some of the general public, the portion that when asked what car they own, answer with a color.
Edit 2: oh gawd, I’m terribly embarrassed, prancing horse on a shield = Porsche and not Ferrari…maybe I should apply for a job at GM.
Hey the Mythbusters proved you can, in fact, polish a turd.
http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/mythbusters-polishing-a-turd.html
I guess the marketing folks at GM watched this episode and figured, they too could polish turds.
-ted
utterly pointless and counterproductive. Yep, that’s GM!
This appears to be a new form of badge-engineering; i.e., copying themselves. Saturn (gm) has already had the money back guarantee for many, many years.
p.s. http://maythebestcarwin.com/ goes to a Yamaha webpage.
That is one of the most useless corporate web sites I’ve ever seen. Completely pointless, much like its parent company.
Hm. When you finish this exercise does a pop-up of a smug Howie Long standing next to a Honda lawnmower appear?
I love this!
Another way for GM to tell people that they are stupid and full of s@#&! What will they do next, send someone over to thump us on the head? Maybe insulting our intelligence is the new black or something.
Classic.
Well the 60 day thing is going to sound great, but its really not going to be a free rental.
Aside from the dozen loopholes and back end ways to make it expensive (15% restocking fee??) the program will probably have, by the time the 60 days is out you will have dropped about a grand getting the thing tagged and titled. Your local Department of Revenue will not be refunding that.
But hey, sounds cool and they have to start somewhere. A non-transferable lifetime bumper to bumper warranty would be the best way to regain public confidence, but god knows how much that would cost.
And there I was, hoping for a “Which manufacturer(s) WON’T you be buying from?” question.
BMW gets ranked as “The Best”? WTF?
Did the Edmunds and Car and Driver staffs spam the voting or something?
Clicked through to this from an ad in gmail yesterday. Guessed that the company behind the ads would be GM, because no one else has been as aggressive in claiming that their cars are the best, and that consumer misperceptions are the problem.
When I voted Ferrari wasn’t on there, or at least I didn’t see it.
And, yes, if the past is any indication they will be massively cherry-picking the data. The questions are about entire brands, and say “cars” not “car,” but they’ll be focusing on specific models.
Also, I imagine GM employees and vendors are “encouraged” to vote for “their” favorite car brand as well. How many people would that be?
M. Karesh, yeah, I think they might also say something like Toyota was voted the maker of the most efficient cars, but hey look, GM has 12 models with 35 MPG or more, and Toyota only has 8! (made up numbers for illustrative purposes) So implying that GM is the purveyor of high fuel efficiency cars, no matter that they are all the same cars with badge engineering.
What would be REALLY great is if they flout the Aveo or Vibe or some other car they don’t make and make a big fuss about how great they are. That would make “changes in the management structure” that much easier.
Why was Hyundai listed twice on every screen? Did they need to fill in a blank?
Also, what in God’s name is the C-shaped emblem with the triangle attached to the right? I could draw you a Citroen or Peugeot emblem and I know every make available in the US off hand, but I can’t tell you what that is. I thought it might be Tesla (theirs is a T-shirt-shaped affair, however), and Spyker and Fisker are even rarer than the exotics not included (Ferrari, Maserati, Aston Martin), so it couldn’t be them.
Finally, I fully enjoyed the fact that Fiat’s ugly little nub ended up on there. I suppose there’s actually public awareness to support name recognition since the Chrysler deal, but they haven’t sold a car in the US since the ’80s (does the public know this?).
@KalapanaBlack:
Also, what in God’s name is the C-shaped emblem with the triangle attached to the right? I could draw you a Citroen or Peugeot emblem and I know every make available in the US off hand, but I can’t tell you what that is.
That would be the “Smart” logo.
Good call. I blanked.
What’s to stop someone from buying a qualifying car, taking a nice long road trip (under 4,000 miles), and returning it after 31 days? They’d only be responsible for one payment on the car.
ROFLMAO! I don’t care for Government Motors anymore than the next guy but seriously, even if I did like them, there is not one question I could honestly vote a GM brand for.
GM is a master of nothing. GM is a leader of nothing. And despite what the arrogant, absent-minded flocktards up in GM management want to believe is a “perception problem”, the Automotive universe does not revolve around RenCen. GM does not build “Teh Best ZOMG! Rulez” vehicles out there.
That dinosaur was extinct long ago.
Well, hell. Ed Whitacre is probably responsible for AT&T’s 30-day return policy on anything you buy in one of their stores. This GM policy is just that same thinking – on a far, far more costly scale.
Maybe GM should have been given 60 days to return the 50 billion in Tarp money.
They are trying to catch people on negative equity trades (you can return the car, but you don’t get your trade back and you still owe the $@@@@ that they paid off on it, so you would be better off keeping the GM car that you don’t like)
Just marketing, one that will probably end up making more future non-customers than customers.
Just took the questionnaire and the results are:
Toyota – Fuel Efficiency
Volvo – Safest
Honda – Quality
BMW – Performance
BMW – The Best
Not a good start for GM.
GMCo. As much as I hate GM, I hate them because they failed and haven’t changed for the better. I hate them because they are clueless gits that dragged all of us down them them. I hate them because they gave the rest of America and industries such a bad name.
But as an American, I would really love to see them succeed, you know, meaningfully. Things like gaining market share, making profit, and returning my money eventually. In the process, they will keep thousands of people employed, fed, educated, secure, it’s all good stuff.
Making them return the money right away isn’t going to help any of that.
Not that I think the current management team can pull it off, which is why I believe a return to accountability and installing some proven industry high performers throughout the company should be a priority, and what I see is too little, too late.
I had Toyota for FE, Volvo for Safety, and Honda for quality. I went ahead a gave Chevrolet the Performance award based solely on the Corvette ZR1. As of this moment in time none of the other manufacturers offered as choices has a supercar currently available for sale to the public that can match the ZR1’s performance, especially at it’s price. If Ferrari or Lamborghini had been available as choices, I would have probably had a different choice. For overall car, I picked Honda, figuring that value for your dollar has to be considered when making such a sweeping choice. BMWs are priced out of the market for most buyers, at least in the middle class circles I run in.
My votes:
VW (diesel) – Fuel Efficiency
Mercedes – Safest
Lexus – Quality
Porsche – Performance
BMW – The Best
Toyota
Acura
Lexus
Lotus
BMW
I went:
FE:VW
S: Volvo
Q: Toyota
P: Infiniti
B: Lexus
To quote the Who,
Meet the New Boss… Same as the Old Boss
We are surprised that the group that came up with “Pontiac is Car” would do something insane as this. This is a “What did you expect moment”
My Picks
VW, MB, Honda, Porsche, Lexus
I wonder if someone in GM marketing will get fired over this?
If there was an option for next make to join Plymouth, Pontiac and Oldsmobile… Then I would have clicked Cadillac.
Obviously there is a GM bizarro World so that would be”
Efficiency: HUMMER
Safety: Pontiac
Quality: Saturn
Performance: Buick
The Best: Chevrolet
This is afterall the World that GM execs seem to live in if they really believe their vehicles are “The best”.
I think it’s a bold in your face campaign that will get noticed for sure. Just look at all the interest at TTAC.
PS Why is Fiat on the list?
VW
BMW
Honda
BMW
BMW
Big believer in TDI and efficient deisels, and VW rocks that here in the US, although the other Germans are catching up.
Reliability of course goes to Honda or Toyota… Honda’s just my personal preference.
Despite the recent styling, I think BMW still makes a hellova car overall.
There’s nothing in the ‘take the survey’ about ‘style.’ Yep, must be a GM marketing exercise.
Otherwise, I would have voted for the Pontiac Aztek. Oh, not an option?
Question to all the GM haters here: would you be satisfied if they were liquidated right now?
What would be the advantage to that, besides people being able to pat themselves on the back about how smart they are?
GM could have skewed it for themselves, just put SUV or American in front of the types and they’d at least get one or two.
American Efficiency
SUV Safety
SUV Quality
SUV Performance
American Best
Since the questions asked about a singular car, here’s what I had in mind with my voting…
Efficiency – Toyota (Prius)
Safety – Volvo (S80)
Quality – Honda (Accord)
Performance – Porsche (911 GT3RS)
Best Overall – BMW (335i)
Question to all the GM haters here: would you be satisfied if they were liquidated right now?
What would be the advantage to that, besides people being able to pat themselves on the back about how smart they are?
I don’t hate GM. I just want the free market to dictate they go away. As long as the Obama administration is around, GM is ours to painfully have and pay for. GM-PLEASE!!–GO TITS UP!!
At least the Honda Mower starts. Again and again. And it sounds like a Trail 70 when it’s running. Somewhat. Fact is, it could probably outrun a few of GM’s cars, too.
Does this remind anyone else of PC’s “i’m a PC” campaign where they try to convince people that PCs are just as good as Macs, but more affordable? I loved how Mac’s response ads were like “yeah, but you’re still a PC…”
When you are actually good you don’t need all the gimmicks and aggressive tactics
esg :
September 11th, 2009 at 1:27 am
I don’t hate GM. I just want the free market to dictate they go away. As long as the Obama administration is around, GM is ours to painfully have and pay for. GM-PLEASE!!–GO TITS UP!!
Like I said…ideology is more important than the well being of hundreds of thousands of working people, plus the well being of our entire economy.
No doubt you’d be patting yourself on the back as the economy craters.
Thanks for proving my point.
As long as the Obama administration is around, GM is ours to painfully have and pay for. GM-PLEASE!!–GO TITS UP!!
You need to check your calendar again… it was actually “W” who bailed out GM last fall Obama is mearly following the Bush plan… Bush Socialized AIG, Citi Group, WaMu, Freddy, Fanny, GM, Chrysler (I’ll spare you the long list)
Actually since Obama took over Bank stocks are up over 20% and the Dow is up over 15%
Just went and voted.. No GM car has been voted the best in any category still and likely never will be.
Why do they do things like this to themselves?
In a week or two, they’ll tally up the votes and then tell us we’re wrong, that GM is the most fuel efficient, etc, etc, etc.
And this advertising campaign will be a really big win because people just love to be told they’re wrong.