Will GM's Money-Back Guarantee Work?
By Daniel Indiviglio
General Motors has announced a new program attempting to boost consumer confidence in their vehicles. The idea is that you can return the vehicle, no questions asked, up to 60 days after purchase. GM believes that if people give their cars a try, they will see that they are at least as good as those built by other manufacturers. Will this new program matter? (And vote after the jump to let us know if you'd buy a GM car based on the new program.)
Here's a blurb from GM's press release:
General Motors announced today that it will offer a Satisfaction Guarantee to eligible buyers of new Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac vehicles. The guarantee allows customers to return their vehicle to their dealer between 31 and 60 days of purchase and receive a refund of the purchase price for the vehicle.
In essence, this program acts as a sort of extended test-drive. Obviously, nothing would have gone wrong with a car in just two months (I hope), so it's not like you can conclude that the car will run fine for several years because it did well for two months. The only thing you can really learn from an extended test-drive is whether you enjoy driving the car, which must be what GM has in mind.
So who will this appeal to? A program like this might seem to be geared towards people who have little experience with GM, are skeptical about their vehicles and like other manufacturers' cars already. I'm not convinced this program will be enough to cause them to give GM a chance. Unless you're unhappy with your current manufacturer, then there's little reason to give GM a shot. If you weren't intrigued by their product before, I don't know how this program would suddenly conjure up new interest.
Instead, it could mostly appeal to those who already like GM, but are worried about its cars quality going forward, now that the government has its hands in the firm. For those individuals, this could persuade them to purchase from GM again. Now, they have two months to see if the new vehicles are still up to their expectations.
The only other group that might find this program attractive is Americans who feel guilty for driving foreign cars. This gives them two months to determine whether GM's cars are tolerable enough to drive, while satisfying their conscience. Of course, they could just take a Ford for a shorter test-drive instead of dealing with a firm that the government had to rescue from the deep abyss of failure. This is also probably a relatively small portion of Americans.
One final observation is that there is definitely one consumer behavior to worry about. Let's say you need to rent a car for two weeks. Just go to GM, "buy" a new car and return it two weeks later, no questions asked. Unfortunately, there isn't really any way for GM to guard against this sort of thing. Luckily, I doubt there are enough evil geniuses out there to really engage in this sort of behavior, so this will likely happen only a handful of times.
But what do you think? Would you be more interested in a GM car because of this program? Voice your opinion in the poll below! |
