He, his team and their cadre of outside agencies need to persuade skeptical, sometimes hostile, consumers to give GM another try.rnc – I imagine lots of things, and then there are facts that most of us will never uncover. You have four on each car, so you save 20 cents a car. Though I will agree that for all his success, the rot did start with Sloan’s policiesAgain, that was a Sloan thing. Participants first studied lists of unrelated items (e.g., table, lock) followed by a recognition test with three types of items: (1) studied items (e.g., table), (2) semantically related lures (e.g., key), and (3) unrelated lures (e.g., cup). @ Christy…Oh yeah I’m still here. Sounds like either the name of an exotic disease or one of those drugs that they sell on those long commercials where they tout the product for 25 seconds and then spend the next 2 minutes on warnings and disclaimers.Couldn’t agree more. Think about the combined hubris and ignorance that must take: Failure in marketing is not a customer problem by it’s very definition.People are fond of saying Toyota is the new GM, but it’s really not true. You’d never see Henderson saying anything near as concrete as what Akio Toyoda has about where this company needs to be. Web. And was that because of him or Wagner and company?Saying “it’s the beancounters” is just as much an oversimplification as saying “it’s the UAW”. (2011). Only recently have I discovered that those days of really adding those fudged details have come back to bite me because my sons are now older and more dependent which gives me time to do more around the house but I now believe that it takes an act of God to do more than I’ve been doing. Howes ignores the outrageousness of Lutz’s steadfast refusal to understand that Buick is an un-brand. I find that hard to believe…all of my doctors always drove Buick’s.”My belief is that GM’s culture started to fail when they put an accounting type at the top. I remember when I became a mom for the first time how difficult it was to get anything done other than feeding, rocking and changing this little demanding being. There is a sameness or familiarity to true doctrine and a strangeness or unfamiliarity to false doctrine. I was 7 years old in 1969, not much interest in cars at the time.If people still think that the “park avenue” and “rendezvous” are still part of Buick’s line-up, then surely (as a marketing bod) Mr Lutz can gauge from that when people started to lose interest in Buick?It says they know where Buick’s been, not where it is or where it’s going.This sentence sums up the real problem. According to the article, “one student, when told she had assaulted a classmate in her teens, ‘elaborately’ filled in all the blanks: what weapon she used (a rock), what the argument was over (a boy), what she was having for dinner when the police came looking for her — even the color of the officers’ hair” (Siegel). - Most false beginners are comfortable with basic conversations such as: ordering food in a restaurant, introducing themselves, talking about their immediate family, etc. I love the examples you used when describing how easy false memories can be formed. Oops. My definition False Familiarity is thinking I am familiar with a stranger just because I have observed that person in my vicinity for a few minutes. If there was a time when Buick stood for innovation or performance, it was before I started getting an interest in cars (circa the mid ’70’s.)The public’s made clear they won’t buy from companies who think their customers are dumbfrucks. There are sycophants and parasites of society that would prey on the weak. Lutz calls that “false familiarity,” arguably worse than no familiarity at all with what GM’s doing today, just months after emerging from a whirlwind through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.It says they know where Buick’s been, not where it is or where it’s going. (For what its worth, I don’t have an Uncle Bobby or an Aunt Jessie, let’s just hope that some day in the future looking back on this class and the blog I haven’t convinced myself that they existed. Complacency definition is - self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies. Think of the troubles that Lehman Bros. and AIG got into with billions at their disposal and the unfettered financial markets of the early part of this decade.Hah! When people are supplied with actual memories, yet have false ones spread amongst them, it is amazing how the human mind will envelop those false memories and believe them to be true. Expecting something different from them would be unrealistic.If my memory serves me correctly (and I think it does) it was Lutz who championed decontenting claiming what was being decontented were things customers would never notice.