GM Ad Czar Bob Lutz Misses the Point. Again. Still.

OK, so GM launches a money-back guarantee for its cars and trucks. A kind of riff on the old “Try it! You’ll like it!” campaign. Except of course, those of us who actually remember the old Alka Seltzer ad (before Kathy Griffin murderized it) will recall that the exhortation to experimentation was ironic. The line—repeated by tens of millions of people ad nauseam—came from the waiter. The waiter, the bad guy of the piece, led the protagonist to try food which later made him want to hug the porcelain god. And that’s the key difference. The Alka ad was selling relief from remorse. The GM ad is selling the customer on the idea that they won’t need relief from buyer’s remorse. The GM ad highlights the possibility of buyer’s remorse, on the second biggest purchase of their customers’ financial lives (after their house). Which makes the nationalized automaker’s buyback campaign as dumb as rocks on toast. The man behind the plan, Maximum Bob Lutz, is completely oblivious to this analysis. In fact . . .

General Motors Co. could extend its offer of a 60-day, money-back guarantee for consumers when the marketing program expires at the end of November, GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said today.

“It’s possibly renewable. We’ll see what kind of experience we have,” Lutz said in an interview on CNBC.

Lutz said that GM expects “way under 1 percent,” of consumers who buy new Cadillacs, Chevrolets, GMC or Buick vehicles will return them in the guarantee program.

Now I’m not sure if it’s Lutz or Automotive News [sub] who’ve made a great landing at the wrong airport: judging the program’s success (or lack thereof) based on the lack of returns, rather than increased sales. But point not taken.

Oh wait, Maximum Bob is focused on the bottom line. My bad.

Lutz said GM was pleased with the initial results of the guarantee program.

He said research by GM and outside analysts showed it had increased the pool of consumers who say they would consider buying a GM vehicle even though it had not boosted sales yet.

Limbo, limbo, limbo! How low can you set that bar, Bobby baby? Would you believe . . . lower?

“We never did want to look at this program as immediately driving sales,” Lutz said.

See? Now that’s fucked-up. You create a program using a wrong metric, use the wrong metric to judge it, then suggest that it did well by the correct metric, and then suggest that the right metric is the wrong metric. Automotive News end the piece in a desperate search for perspective, but when you’ve already fallen down the rabbit hole, even ritual appeasement comes hard. So to speak.

GM expects 2009 to end at around 10 million to 10.5 million in total sales with 2010 sales recovering to near 13 million.

In 2008, U.S. total sales were 13.2 million. This year will mark the fourth consecutive one of falling U.S. sales.

Lutz said GM dealers are low on inventory of better-selling vehicles but have “plenty of inventory” of full-sized sports utility vehicles and pickup trucks.