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August 3, 2009 Issue Posted July 23, 2009, 5:00PM EST

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Hellovon

Bob Lutz, GM Salesman

At 77, General Motors Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz was just named GM's global marketing chief as the automaker emerges from Chapter 11. BusinessWeek senior correspondent David Kiley talked with Lutz about what he'll bring to the job—and how he'll change it.

Do you think you're in tune with where the consumer is going?

Most people assume I'm an engineer. Actually, my MBA is in marketing from the University of California, where I took courses in psychology, anthropology, and sociology. I did my thesis on how people respond to visual stimuli and how it influences their actions. I was head of sales and marketing at BMW in Munich when "The Ultimate Driving Machine" tagline was born. And when I was Chrysler president, I had to be attuned to marketing: It was so important to [CEO Lee] Iacocca.

What's wrong with GM's marketing? How will you change it?

To spend $200 million on manufacturing, we have to get board approval, with top management involved from an early stage. Yet we spend billions on marketing and delegate that to too many people at the lowest levels. It's insanity. Now, ideas on how to tell our story will be reviewed by me and often by Fritz [CEO Henderson]. We remade the global design process by going with our instincts, not consumer testing. This process will be analogous to that.

In the '90s, GM brought in outside marketers, with terrible results.

That was a typical GM shotgun approach. They scooped up people from packaged goods companies. Selling cars isn't like selling soft drinks and toothpaste. The automobile you drive carries much more social currency, and the job requires that perspective.

Is there an ad or campaign on your radar for what GM should be doing?

The Evian water online video, with the infants roller-skating. It's arresting. It's very likable. At GM, we will be much more active in executing ideas that spread virally on the Internet.

Some say you're too much an insider to revolutionize GM's marketing.

The structure we've just set up is more radical than anything we've ever done. We're grouping design, marketing, and communications. If design has a good idea for which it needs funding, we can take it from advertising or communications. If marketing needs money, we can take it from design. That flexibility never existed before. It was often impossible for the best ideas to get funded. That stops now.

Is GM ready for a cultural change?

In 2001, when I took over global product planning, it was as dysfunctional as marketing is now. I said we aren't going to do it this way anymore. People said, "Here comes crazy Lutz." But GM took to [my ideas] very fast.

Broken-Guitar Hero

Canadian singer Dave Carroll is now on the map, courtesy of United Airlines (UAUA). In March 2008 he was changing planes in Chicago on the way to a gig when he saw baggage handlers tossing instruments. Finding his $3,500 Taylor acoustic guitar damaged, Carroll tried for more than a year to get United to pay for the $1,200 repair. No luck. So he made a music video, United Breaks Guitars, posting it on YouTube on July 6. So far, it's had 3.5 million hits. After the video went up, United gave $3,000 to charity at Carroll's request. (It chose a music institute.) The airline, which is using the video to train service reps, says it had declined to pay Carroll because he didn't report the damage within 24 hours. Now, it says, it will "do a better job" of figuring out when to bend the rule.

—Christopher Palmeri

MLB Cuts Madoff

Bernard Madoff has been ruled out by Major League Baseball—out of the lineup of some new MLB-licensed cards issued by Topps. Back in March, Topps announced it would include a Bernard Madoff card in its 2009 Allen & Ginter packs, a popular Topps line that mixes ballplayers in with historical figures, Scrabble champs, and—now—the "World's Biggest Hoaxes, Hoodwinks & Bamboozles." Collectors, the company said then, would have a 1 in 240 chance of getting a "Madoff" in each $3 pack. But before the cards hit retailers in July, Madoff was removed from the roster. MLB declined to comment. New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon reportedly lost millions in the scandal. But Topps spokesman Matthew Altman says MLB cut Madoff on the grounds that his case was so fresh it would be in poor taste to include him. Cards for other frauds, such as Charles Ponzi and the Enron corporation, remain in the set.

—By Yuval Rosenberg

It's a Vision Thing

Are stock analysts swayed by an annual report's CEO letter to stockholders? Yes, concludes a forthcoming study in Organization Science. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University and other schools looked at 367 shareholder letters written by new CEOs from 1990 to 1999—giving each leader a "charismatic vision" score. To assign ratings, they scrutinized the texts for moral, ideological, and emotional characterizations of future plans and past mistakes. They also counted the number of times such words as "believe" and "commitment" appeared—along with team-oriented terms like "we" and "our." Their finding: the more charismatic the text, defined in this way, the more likely analysts were to issue a "buy" for the company. Such language also led to off-the-mark earnings forecasts from analysts. While the decade studied coincided with the dot-com era, when analysts often said "buy," Penn State management professor and co-author Vilmos Misangyi believes the findings also apply to the current economy, as uncertainties may prompt a strong reliance on a business leaders' words. "If anything," he says, "I would expect stronger effects today."

—Jena McGregor

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