What’s in the water in Detroit these days? First you see GM teaming up with eBay – a deal that has the potential to finally shake up the buyer experience in the auto industry, and now they are talking about "money back guarantees". They must be crazy.

It’s logical that a "near brush with death", like GM’s bankruptcy, should create an unfreezing of business practices. Yet somehow, many people never quite expected even this kind of disruption to force change in the industry. What GM is doing, if it succeeds, is re-writing the rules for the automobile industry and they, as the company with nothing to lose, is in the perfect position to do so.

So what do you do if you believe you have a competitive product, but a legacy problem with detractors? Word of mouth is negative, net promoter scores low, and the competition has built a considerable advantage over the years playing the game by the old set of rules.

Obviously, we would recommend building an “army of promoters” as a long term strategy for growth, but what if you don’t have until "the long term?" Answer: change the rules by which your competitors won the previous round. Provide an insurance policy that encourages trial and, assuming trial is successful; you have a potential mitigating strategy for your brand shortcomings. Clever.

Of course, look at this from another angle. A guarantee costs money, even if just a small percentage of buyers take GM up on their offer. And that cost can be viewed as a cost of brand weakness, a tax on a low NPS. It may turn out that as other companies consider matching the offer, post sales costs become another source of competitive cost advantage for NPS leaders. I would suspect it’s already the case to some degree.

In the meantime, those costs make good sense for GM, as does turning the buying experience on its head using eBay. You never know, the next big disruptive move might be to change the notion of customer loyalty and how it is measured.