Gm Wants Dealers To Sell Gm Products Only Auto Maker Wants Its Dealers To Stop Selling Competitors’ Cars

General Motors Corp. wants its dealers to stop selling competitors’ vehicles, the company said Monday in an outline of a strategy to hone brand images and reduce the number of GM dealers.

In a news release and a letter to dealers, the company’s top North American marketing executive said GM cars and trucks “are not commodities and should not be offered to the public from facilities that also offer competing brands.”

GM also wants to eliminate Cadillac and GMC Truck dealerships from rural markets and specify preferred combinations in “dualed” dealerships, those which handle more than one GM product line.

The aim is to strengthen the images of GM’s brands, reduce the overall number of dealers and eliminate situations where GM brands that compete against one another are sold in the same dealership.

GM vice president Ronald L. Zarrella said the preferred situation in most cases is to have dealers handle a single GM division’s brands if the local market is strong enough to support that configuration. In the ideal, Chevrolet dealers would sell only Chevys, Cadillac dealers only Cadillacs, and so forth.

The exception would be for Pontiac and GMC Truck brands. For them, the “preferred network pattern” would be for the two brands to be sold in combined dealerships, GM said.

In markets that aren’t strong enough to support single-line dealers of GM’s other divisional products, the company wants dealerships in these combinations:

Buick-Pontiac-GMC Truck.

Oldsmobile with Cadillac, or with Chevrolet if Cadillac is not represented in the market.

In rural areas, the preferred combination would be Chevrolet-Buick-Pontiac-Oldsmobile, with no representation by Cadillac and GMC Truck.

Saturn dealerships would continue to offer only Saturn division vehicles.

“Each brand needs to be properly presented to the public through a renewed emphasis on having the right number of dealers, at the right locations and of the right size,” Zarrella said.

GM officials were not immediately available Monday to elaborate on the news release, which was silent on how some of the more difficult changes might be accomplished.

However, the trade journal Automotive News reported Monday that GM’s board has promised Zarrella the money needed to put the plan in place. Presumably, GM would buy out some dealers and arrange mergers among others. Automotive News said the company wants to cut the number of GM dealerships to about 6,700 from the present 8,400, and pressure dealers to separate their GM operations from competitive brands and relocate to thriving suburban retail districts. GM has long said it wanted to trim its network to 7,000 dealers by the year 2000.

Zarrella, former president of Bausch & Lomb Corp., was hired last December to bring an outsider’s expertise to the effort to improve the brand images of GM’s divisions and products.

The company sells cars and trucks in North America through seven marketing divisions that often have seemed to compete with each other.

GM’s divisions are Chevrolet, Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Cadillac, GMC Truck and Saturn.