Stop Worrying About Market Share

I'll try to keep auto industry rants to only every fourth post or so. I hope.

I see they've reshuffled the top management at GM. It's not going to do anything unless they fix their fundamental problems. Here's one of them: concentrating on market share as a key business metric. This causes three problems: discounting and incentives, reluctance to kill dead brands and duplication of across brands (brand cannibalism).

Stop worrying about market share. Worry about profits and products. The only way you will ever increase market share is to build better products and have distinctive brands. You will never increase it on a sustained basis by incentives and duplication. You are treating market share as an ego thing - "We're falling behind Toyota!" You're already behind Toyota from a product perspective.

You've already heard about dead brands, and you'll hear more about brand cannibalism in future posts.