GM’s New Marketing Head: Company Took “Our Eye Off the Ball” for More Than Twenty Years

[Image: daniel.gene/Flickr]

GM’s new marketing head Bob Lutz was interviewed by NPR’s Robert Siegel this week. Lutz is a longtime GM veteran who was on the verge of retirement but recently took the position of overseeing all marketing and communications efforts with the goal of reworking GM’s image. BusinessWeek‘s Jon Fine highlights this specific passage from the interview:

Mr. LUTZ: [W]here we really messed it up and took our eye off the ball in terms of product was in ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s. And I think we’ve – in the last five or six years – we’ve had a radical transformation in the way we approach the product and our goals for products and look at the awards we’ve gotten. We got car of the year.

SIEGEL: But when you take your eye off the ball for more than 20 years…

Mr. LUTZ: Yeah, well, that was bad. …

We appreciate the candor, but also wouldn’t be surprised if GM put Lutz through another round of media training.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.