Comments on: Robert Lutz and marketing malpractice

By: Grant McCracken

Grant McCracken — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:27:14 +0000

Arvind Venkataramani
(grant, your blog is acting up. tried to comment and it just gave me missing images and nice spinning wheels.)

Re your gatorade post: Lutz IS apparently behind some of GM's moves - a designer friend of mine (self-employed, not a big name) got cal...led in to Detroit recently - partly because he obsesses about cars on Twitter. Their (GM's) words: "we haven't been listening to you in 20 years, we're sorry, and it's time to fix that".

By: Roo

Roo — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:23:09 +0000

You know... The sad part about this is that I think you really NAILED IT. They just don't get it. When Oldsmobile went under in '04, I felt like a little piece of me died. Like losing a distant relative or a celebrity. With Pontiac, the same thing... And I never even owned one! But, I grew up with them. It's a shame to see GM stray so far from success... Especially, now that WE'RE co-signing onto this continuation of b.s. Not sure what to make of those comments... 'Marketing myopia,' denial, 'fronting' or having absolutely no sense of where they are in the marketplace. Whatever the case, it strikes me as unacceptable.

If GM vehicles 'easily trounce the foreign competition...' really?? REALLY?! Then maybe that 'success' is in areas that just don't matter as much in impacting sales.

Thanks for calling him on it, and it wasn't bad tempered/hectoring to me.

By: srp

srp — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:56:58 +0000

Lutz also ignores the problem of signaling. Even if you, a button-down conservative sort, happen to like the way you look with a nose ring for purely aesthetic, formal reasons, getting one will cause people to infer various untrue things about your values and character. You might decide to put up with this on a conscious basis, but to be unaware of the signals one sends with these choices is likely to be dysfunctional. Similarly, a GM car sends a signal that many, many people don't want to send. GM needs to fix that, but they'll probably be dead before that happens.

By: peter

peter — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 11:29:59 +0000

There's a possible campaign for GM, in this statement:

"I think an audacious and bold person with a mind of his or her own would go to a dealership . . ."

I'm thinking something like:

"Buy GM and show yourself to be audacious and bold with a mind of your own!"

Well-executed, that campaign should garner a lot of lemmings, right there!

By: Tom Asacker

Tom Asacker — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:24:04 +0000

"a simple act of meaning transfer."

Not so simple, and not really a transfer. More like a co-creation, with the result being a personal narrative.