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Can You Trust Those Awards You See in Auto Ads? (2010)

consumerreports.org

11–20 of 51 posts

Re: Can You Trust Those Awards You See in Auto Ads? (2010)

#11
The same goes, if I remember my HR buddy correctly, for quite a few of those "best company to work at" awards.

So if it isn't a reputable source, why trust any of this crap? It like all these logos that companies (or industry groups) invent and use as a trust icon on packaging. Just mostly crap. My So did an evaluation of those for food not long ago in Germany. Damn that was a real eye opener.

Re: Can You Trust Those Awards You See in Auto Ads? (2010)

#15

Consumer reports is funded by the Ford foundation. Interesting they didn’t mention that

I'm not familiar with the Ford Foundation or its work. However, from reading their Wikipedia article, I get the sense that they are pretty independent from the Ford company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Foundation Per Wikipedia: "Between 1955 and 1974, the foundation sold its Ford Motor Company holdings and now plays no role in the automobile company."

One-layer deeper question: How much power/influence do people closely tied to Ford Motor have at the Ford Foundation? Looking here - https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/board-of-trustees/ - only Henry Ford III is an obvious "Ford Motor / Ford family" member of their Board of Trustees. Behind the scenes and deeper? Hard to know.

Bigger picture: Since CR has been doing at-scale quantitative ratings of cars for decades, it should be pretty easy to run some stats, and see if they have a meaningful pro-Ford bias.

Opinion: If I was running both Ford Motors and the Ford Foundation, I'd be telling CR that I wanted 100%-unvarnished-truth reviews and ratings of Ford Motors products from them. Because done-right data from CR would be a ~99%-independent check on what my underlings at Ford Motor were telling me. (And, yes, cheating in Ford's favor would be damn likely to turn into a disastrous scandal.)

Re: Can You Trust Those Awards You See in Auto Ads? (2010)

#16
Honestly you can't trust a lot you see in ads. You can't even trust your manufacturer or the dealership selling the cars. Some brand new cars are sold with TSBs that haven't been fixed or addressed.

I use https://www.carcomplaints.com/ when I'm shopping for a car to know which used cars to avoid.

Re: Can You Trust Those Awards You See in Auto Ads? (2010)

#17

The same goes, if I remember my HR buddy correctly, for quite a few of those "best company to work at" awards. So if it isn't a reputable source, why trust any of this crap? It like all these logos that companies (or industry groups) invent and use as a trust icon on packaging. Just mostly crap. My So did an evaluation of those for food not long ago in Germany. Damn that was a real eye opener.

You have to remember, you (the car buyer, employee, or shopper) aren't the target for these awards. These award companies market to mid-senior level VPs who have spending power and want to approach senior company leaders with a good story for their end-of-year review & bonus evaluation.

Nothing quite like the HR Director saying "Well under my leadership we were rated as one of the top 100 companies to work for!" But the awards company only has 100 spots available to consider, and you have to pay the awards company to evaluate you...

Re: Can You Trust Those Awards You See in Auto Ads? (2010)

#18

The same goes, if I remember my HR buddy correctly, for quite a few of those "best company to work at" awards. So if it isn't a reputable source, why trust any of this crap? It like all these logos that companies (or industry groups) invent and use as a trust icon on packaging. Just mostly crap. My So did an evaluation of those for food not long ago in Germany. Damn that was a real eye opener.

I used to take tier1/2 at a multitenant call center and one of our clients was Ethisphere - the "most ethical companies" people. They email blast companies every year to get them to take the stupid self-answer questionnaire and pay a couple thousand and get to call themselves ethical.

Re: Can You Trust Those Awards You See in Auto Ads? (2010)

#19
One of the big revelations I had when I worked with a marketing team the first time was so long as you pay the fee and have a good enough write-up, you'll get just about any award. No one checks the claims, just waits for the check to clear.

That year we "won" the Red Herring, WEF Innovator, and I want to say Red Dot, and a couple of others for stuff that was not innovative, nor applicable to half the stuff we claimed it was. Of course we were also a Top Place to Work according to several big publications in spite of the dysfunction and high turnover.

Re: Can You Trust Those Awards You See in Auto Ads? (2010)

#20

Honestly you can't trust a lot you see in ads. You can't even trust your manufacturer or the dealership selling the cars. Some brand new cars are sold with TSBs that haven't been fixed or addressed. I use https://www.carcomplaints.com/ when I'm shopping for a car to know which used cars to avoid.

Often, the salespeople don’t actually know anything about the vehicles they’re selling either. I’ve had salespeople who don’t know the engine or transmission configurations of the cars on their lots. I spent a long many emails recently trying to explain to a Toyota sales rep how payload capacity works. Even after meeting him in person and explaining it to him again, I was totally unable to get the real payload numbers of a vehicle I wanted to buy.
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