The Wall Street Journal is reporting (here, but subscription required) that GM is pulling ad spending from the LA Times:

“In response to a series of articles about the auto maker, General Motors Corp. has pulled all of its advertising from Tribune Co.’s Los Angeles Times for the foreseeable future, GM said yesterday.

… In a Wednesday column, Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times auto critic Dan Neil sharply criticized GM for what he said were a series of poor management decisions and called for the ouster of GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner. In the column, titled “An American Idle,” he also described the Pontiac G6 as a “sales flop.” His conclusion: “When ballclubs have losing records, players and coaches and managers get their walking papers. At GM, it’s time to sweep the dugout.”

… GM informed the company of its decision to pull the ads Wednesday, after Mr. Neil’s column appeared. Asked if the piece prompted GM’s action, Mr. Smith said, “Dan’s column ran yesterday. We were contacted by GM yesterday. So that would indicate this is a concern to them.”"

If you think Steve Jobs exists in a reality distortion field, GM management lives in a reality denial field. After thirty years of continually sliding market share representing millions and millions of individual purchasing decisions, GM decides that punishing critics is the answer to its problems?

Twenty years ago this writer sat in a class of MBA students and listened to Roger Smith — yes, the GM Chairman in Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me” — state that GM quality was as good as any in the world. This was at the same time that many segments of American manufacturing were collapsing in the face of import competition and auto execs were scurrying to Japan to see how much of Toyota’s system they could copy. Smith lost that class of proto-yuppies right then and there. My guess is that Smith, driving factory maintained cars in a city where imports were disdained and relying on information filtered up through one of the largest industrial bureaucracies on the planet, actually believed what he said.

And it sounds like GM management is still only partially connected to reality. In their world, GM is #1 and Dan Neil’s criticism is illegitimate. Objectively, while GM has individual success stories, such as the Cadillac turnaround, for the most part it remains a jumble of unfocused divisions (what is the point of Buick?), disappointing cars, and fewer and fewer buyers.

GM wants positive press? Design and assemble great cars. Lashing out at well-considered criticism will only perpetuate GM’s denial of its mediocrity.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 7th, 2005 at 10:44 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, How Not To Succeed In Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.