GM's 'Future Leaders': Mike Devereux
September 17, 2008
By Dale Buss
A few years ago, General Motors canned its initial task force that was charged with making sense of Internet sales and marketing, called eGM, and Mike Devereux was one of those who got dislocated. "EGM was wine before our time," he said.
But now, as GM's executive director of digital and CRM marketing, Devereux believes that he and the company finally are in the right places when it comes to exploiting the online medium. "The job I have now isn't wine before its time," said the 43-year-old native Brit. "It's prime time."
GM finally has gotten its arms around the Internet, Devereux said, for a few reasons. "We completely have been aggressive on infrastructure; the dealer network has ramped up very fast to accept online customers; and media budgets have shifted in ways that you couldn't have predicted even two years ago - not to forsake traditional media but to totally embrace non-traditional media," he said.
And now, Devereux is enjoying the ride. "There's a lot of stuff going on in my space, and there isn't a road map," he said. "Like convincing people who've been making TV ads for 30 years that they also have to look at data. It's cathartic stuff."
Anything with Cars
But unlike many who have ended up thriving as denizens of the internet, Devereux isn't a computer geek. He actually is a car guy.
His family emigrated from England to Montreal when Devereux was a child and attended General Motors Institute in Michigan(now known as Kettering University) on a scholarship. "I thought I wanted to be an engineer and design cars," he said.
Unfortunately, Devereux soon discovered that "I didn't have that gene to be great at expressing what's in my head as a picture," he said. "But I never had any desire to do packaged goods or sell bleach or pens. It wasn't, 'I want to be a marketer and I'll be a marketer at any company.' It was, 'I'm an auto guy and I will do any job in the auto industry.'"
So his first job with GM was in its parts and service group. After the first Gulf War, Devereux moved to Dubai to help rebuild the GM dealer network in Kuwait. "That was four years of human training," he said. "Mostly selling ideas to people from backgrounds completely different from mine and understanding how you can help them."
After that, Devereux attended Harvard University to obtain an MBA, intending all along to come back to GM upon graduation. Eventual CEO Rick Wagoner, who was head of North American operations at the time, brought him back in 1997 as head of the launch team for the 2000 Cadillac Deville DTS. As a devoted car guy, Devereux said, "That was a dream job."
His eGM assignment was next, a period that Devereux described as a "maelstrom." Why did eGM go so bad?
"From an infrastructure standpoint, we needed to knock it out of the park, and we didn't," he said. "Dealerships had to be ready and willing to embrace it, and they weren't. Consumers had to be willing to trust 'electronic handshakes,' and they weren't. Search didn't even exist back then. And going on a web site was like using Windows; now there are a thousand doors to a web site, but there used to be one."
Putting eGM Behind
Since it has re-integrated corporate efforts to harness the internet, Devereux said, GM is faring much better. A couple of years ago it became one of the first automakers, for example, to make a significant shift of marketing resources toward the internet.
Nowadays, Devereux calls his current job "the best I've ever had." One reason, he said, is that "we're inventing stuff, which is really exciting." Also, "The company is right there [supporting] us, from [Wagoner] on down. Rick is very progressive, and we're bringing big swaths of capital to bear on places we need to invest, where we need to be leading now."
And unlike in the eGM days, when few were clear about what significance internet sales and marketing ultimately might have, Devereux believes that GM now has a handle on it.
"Over the next two or three yeas, marketing will change dramatically, and the kinds of people who are marketers will change," Devereux said. "You'll see people who are far more data-driven become marketing leaders. And the kinds of humans launching cars five years from now aren't those who are doing it today."
As for Devereux himself? "I've got a couple or three or four years in this job to help change the game," he said. "And the people who run the place four to 10 years from now will be the people who are part of changing that game. I've got my head down."
Mike Devereux
Title: Executive Director, Corporate Digital Marketing and CRM
Location: GM Headquarters in Detroit
Age: 43
Born: United Kingdom
Personal: Married with three sons.
Spare-time pursuits: Serving as a Boy Scouts master. "Between that and my sons' sports, it's work. I have no other time. I'm a pretty meat-and-potatoes Midwestern guy."
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