The Dealer Impact Blog

GM/Cobalt Mandate

If you are a GM dealer, I am sure you have received some pressure from GM or Cobalt to give your domain name to them or forfeit your leads from GM. I have received many calls in regard to this, from customers and non-customers wanting to know what this is all about. Cobalt is a company that likes to strike up relationships with manufacturers and build manufacturer endorsed template web sites. Their goal is to try and standardize the message across all GM dealership sites. The issue is most GM dealerships do not want to integrate a cookie cutter template site with no individual brand. History has proven that these websites do not work. Cobalt created manufacturer endorsed 5 star sites for Chrysler and we can see that almost 99% of these dealerships have created their own website and have a secondary 5 star site linked up to Chrysler.com. GM has decided to try this for GM dealerships and Cobalt is helping with the push. They are trying to strong arm dealerships into using this site as their primary site. One year ago they attempted to do this and to charge the dealerships for it and dealerships just did not bite. Since that did not work they decided to give it away for free. Now they are notifying GM dealerships that they must provide their domain names so the Cobalt site can be set up to point to the compliant site instead of what they already have in place. All the calls I have received are from GM dealerships who are upset and confused. They are very upset and wondering what is going on and what to do, so here is the really simply solution to this whole dilemma.

Simply go register a new domain name, maybe a .net or .web address with your name. Give this domain information to GM/Cobalt and let them set the compliant site up under the new domain. You then have the Cobalt site running in cyberspace and you get the link on the GM website. You can still run your own website with whomever you would like under the original domain name with no changes.

Problem Solved!

Brian Cox
President
Dealer Impact Systems