How do companies still operating in a push business model compete in a contracted pull marketplace? That’s a question people are asking Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman of the new and improved GM.
When asked what business strategy GM is going to employ now that the company has emerged from bankruptcy, Lutz said they’re going to “build cars the consumer public wants to buy.”
Now there’s a novel idea. One has to wonder why they didn’t think of that before.
The 77-year-old Lutz, who was planning to retire at the end of the year but returns to his old title with new focus and responsibilities — overseeing design, marketing and public relations — says he’s a marketing guy at heart. He has an MBA in marketing and studied consumer behavior in college. His stated intent is to turn GM into a consumer-centric company, though he hasn’t said exactly how he intends to do that, other than making cars people want to buy. Maybe he can build a distribution model that allows customers to buy cars they want the way they want.
Now that I’m a part-owner of Government Motors, I’m taking considerably more interest in the company and it certainly is encouraging to see they’re bringing in some new talent with fresh ideas. So I did a little checking and found that Mr. Lutz has been in the automotive business for a long, long time, with a list of impressive success stories on which to build. It makes me feel a lot better about the company’s future. I just hope the guy lives long enough to get the job done
Prior to his first stint as Vice Chairman at GM, Bob was CEO of a company called Exide Technologies, where he reorganized global operations, bringing focus to its core business (car batteries), then bringing the company into bankruptcy two years later.
Before that he was a Division President at Chrysler where he oversaw development of the Plymouth Prowler, which was available in 12 colors — now we’re making some progress. A total of 11,000 were sold over a four-year period before it was pulled out of production.
As a VP at Ford prior to that, he brought the short-lived Mercury Merkor to market.
And, he was a lead investor in the Cunningham C7, the super car that never made it to market.
To his credit, Bob is something of a visionary and certainly not risk averse. And he knows how to blog. So, can this 77-year-old auto executive for a failed company reach out and connect with the hearts and minds of a skeptical consumer public, with a couple of surviving brands, in a highly competitive, contracted market?
It seems like a formidable undertaking, but in the words of Henry Ford, “There are no big problems, just a lot of little problems. And what’s right about America is that although we have a mess of problems, we have the capacity to do something about them.”
Go Bob!
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