The financial benefits need some extra consideration here. For decades, GM didn't much care how you paid for any accessories you put on your new GM vehicle. But now the company is making an effort to get you to buy from its selection of parts and that means the purchase can be part of the monthly finance plan, either the traditional kind or the lease. Since accessories can easily run to a couple of thousand dollars, that's not a minor advance.
On a related note, GM is now working to see that many of the accessories are now included in the book value of the vehicle. Johnston says, "The big change is the attention being paid to whether that accessory can be residualized." If the part is residualized, then the owner gets a higher residual value (i.e. resale value) when the time comes to sell it. This, too, can mean significant amounts of money to the consumer.
None of this will be of much interest to the average buyer, of course, if there aren't accessories worth buying. GM knows this and is working hard on a solution, says Nancy McLean, GM of Canada's director of sales and marketing for its service and parts operation.
"The brand teams are focussing on accessories from the very beginning" McLean says, "and they're working up front more so at the time of launch we have a greater array of packages."
She says that, effective January 1, 2001, GM will "have a person called the Vehicle Personalization Executive. The key focus of this person will be to work between the brand and engineering teams to accelerate what we have done. We've doubled engineers, purchasing folks and the marketing teams working on accessories. More and more the volume of accessories will be much higher."