Has Netstar shot itself in the foot?

Quite simply, while Netstar's reaction might well look like some very clever one-upmanship, particularly in terms of special deals offering to replace competitor's tracking devices with their own and while it might well get some reasonable short term reaction, when a push comes to a shove it is simply highlighting a perception that frankly makes all tracking and vehicle recovery companies look bad.

What Netstar did not seem to think about is that the motoring public don't necessarily think in terms of brand names but in terms of an industry. This is generally the case when this sort of thing happens.

I remember when Mercedes Benz had an embarrassing problem with their S-Class many years ago, there was a suggestion that BMW should do exactly what Netstar has done and that is leap into the void, start crowing about how good BMW's were in not having the S-Class's problems and offering sweet trade-in deals.

General problem

The then chairman of BMW send out a memo explaining that while the media might well have been falling about and making fun of Merc's silly mistake, the car-buying public, he said, were seeing this as a German car problem and not just one specifically related to Merc.

Netstar might well gain some quick sales out of its ad campaign but in the long term it's not doing its industry any good whatsoever. And heaven help it if it one day end up with just one employee somewhere who gets nicked for handing out confidential information.

Public not stupid

The public is not stupid and perceptions are a lot more powerful than reality. Consumers will not see this as a purely Tracker problem but will see fire where there is smoke and leap to all sorts of conclusions.

I am not suggesting for a minute that the industry tries to cover things up. What I am suggesting is that if Netstar used its time, effort and money to help solve the crisis for the whole industry, it would benefit far more than this rather childish knee-jerk campaign.

Vehicle tracking and recovery is good business nowadays but what all these companies need to ask themselves is how well they would be doing if insurance companies did not insist that their clients install these devices on their cars? That would give them a very good idea of exactly what motorists think of them. And this in turn would help them determine whether a one-upmanship campaign is a good idea or really dumb.