Posted by: Mitch/Ralph on: August 28, 2009
Occasionally I vent about my home state and today is one of those days. The Government of the State of California is anti-business (except for taxing them) and can’t understand when companies choose not to expand to the State to be abused. Toyota announced today that they are closing their California plant (NUMMI) that they [...]
Posted by: Mitch/Ralph on: August 20, 2009
Your have probably read about the delays in processing the checks back to the auto dealers in the cash for clunkers program. The dealers pay out the rebate money to the consumer when the consumer buys the new car under the program. Then the dealer borrows that money from their credit line until they receive it from the [...]
Posted by: Mitch/Ralph on: July 13, 2009
Demanding accountability from Marketing has been the focus in many companies for a few years now. Metrics and dashboards have been the primary action taken by Marketing to respond to this pressure. (What better way to convince people you are “accountable” then with a cool, and expensive, dashboard which displays metrics of what you can [...]
Posted by: Mitch/Ralph on: July 10, 2009
As you undoubtedly know, General Motors exited from bankruptcy today. The new company will focus on “customers, cars and culture.” As part of the announcement they stated that “Top executives at the new company will focus on business results, new vehicles, brands and consumers.” Sounds good, but what on earth else would they think they [...]
Posted by: Mitch/Ralph on: June 30, 2009
As we noted in a January post, Hyundai USA created a program to overcome new car sales resistance, which they perceived was caused by fear of the customer losing their job. The Hyundai Assurance program worked well for them and the idea was copied by others.
Apparently Hyundai’s current customer insight program has determined that 40% [...]
Posted by: Mitch/Ralph on: June 15, 2009
As I have posted a few times in the last few weeks, I do not understand the logic behind reducing dealers and saving the car companies. I understand why the manufacturers might want to reduce the number of dealers, but I do not understand the use of cost savings as the justification. I have been [...]
Posted by: Mitch/Ralph on: June 13, 2009
The June 8th issue of Forbes has as its cover story the new breed of American car companies. Unlike to old days, in which car companies were vertically integrated manufacturing enterprises, the new breed is more akin to a fabless semiconductor firm. The fabless semiconductor company doesn’t own any manufacturing capacity; rather it designs semiconductors [...]
Posted by: Mitch/Ralph on: June 3, 2009
In a prior post, I questioned the savings to be gained by Chrysler and GM from cutting the number of dealers they had. Clearly there would be some small savings in support costs, but most companies would rather be over-distributed than under-distributed, so those savings could not be a real reason. Clearly, also, there were [...]
