Chevy Launches Employee Pricing Promo at Unfortunate Time

Sometimes I wonder about GM’s marketing and PR departments. I know for a fact there are competent people who work in both, but there must be something like serious groupthink going on in both. How else do you explain the bobbling of the announcement that the company will shift production to models that actually sell? Or the latest promotion, on the coattails of the other snafu: Chevy is launching a year-end employee pricing campaign.

Yes, you read that correctly. After announcing it will stop making several model lines, idling and possibly closing multiple factories in the U,S, and Canada, consumers can get the same deal as a Chevy employee! It’s like a dream come true, if your dream is sick and twisted, involving wondering during the holidays if you’ll have a job in a few months.

The tone-deaf nature of this marketing campaign, especially the timing of it, is just unbelievable. Maybe some people won’t put two and two together, but enough likely will. In this day and age of the internet and social media, it won’t take long before people churn out vicious memes about this marketing campaign, which will be clever enough to spread like wildfire.

There’s another controversy about this promotion. It erodes profit margins and arguably makes sales tank for several months. The move likely is to pump up lackluster annual sales figures, plus dump off cars that have been sitting in lots for too long.