GM’s Slide: Bosses Misjudged New Urban Tastes

Lee Hawkins, Jr (a writer who used to work in Madison and Milwaukee):

In December, General Motors Corp. ran a series of ads across the U.S. showing Cadillacs being driven in snow. The decision to do so was made by the giant car maker’s executives in Detroit, where on Christmas Day, temperatures hovered just above freezing.
The ads also ran in Miami, a vibrant car market where GM has bombed for the past 15 years. As Christmas dawned, temperatures there started climbing into the high 70s.
GM is struggling under a financial burden created by monumental pension and health-care obligations. But it’s also having a hard time persuading Americans to buy its cars. One reason: GM’s cumbersome and unresponsive bureaucracy, the one that ran the snow ads in Miami, has for years failed to connect with the tastes and expectations of consumers outside the company’s Midwestern base.

Hawkins does a nice job digging into this issue with examples from mid level GM employees. GM has a large assembly facility in nearby Janesville.