Company: TRUE
Filing Date: 2025-08-07
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0001327318-25-000036
Chunk: 101

Company: TrueCar, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-08-07
Form: 10-Q
Item: Part II, Item 1A
Chunk 101
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 permit the recovery of incremental user acquisition costs through revenue growth. This limits the growth in revenue that can be achieved through marketing expenditures. If we are unable to recover our marketing costs through increases in user traffic and in the number of transactions by users of our platform, our growth, results of operations and financial condition could be materially adversely affected.

Additionally, if we discontinue our broad marketing campaigns or elect to reduce our sales and marketing costs to decrease our losses, as we have done in the past in during periods of economic uncertainty, our ability to acquire consumers and dealers and grow our revenues would be adversely affected. Further, the industry-wide vehicle inventory shortages that began in 2021 resulted in increased vehicle prices that required us to discontinue long-running, high-performing advertising messages about the amount of savings that our users typically save off of the manufacturers’ suggested retail price, which we believe reduces the effectiveness of our advertising. For more information on these inventory shortages, see the risk factor entitled “Our business is subject to risks related to the larger automotive ecosystem, including tariffs, inventory and global supply chain challenges, labor and other factors.”

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Our current and potential competitors may also have significantly more financial, marketing and other resources than we have and the ability to devote greater resources to the promotion and support of their products and services. The realities of competing for users and brand visibility, as well as ensuring the satisfaction of our dealers, may limit our ability to reduce our own marketing expenditures, potentially negatively impacting our operating margins and financial results.

Moreover, the number of transactions generated by the members of our affinity group marketing partners depends in part on the emphasis that these affinity group marketing partners place on marketing the purchase of cars within their platforms as well as third-party advertising platforms. Should one or more of our affinity group marketing partners decide to deemphasize the marketing of our platform, or if their marketing efforts are otherwise unsuccessful, our revenue, business and financial results would be harmed.

Finally, as noted above, we rely in part on digital and online media for our marketing efforts. Historically, this has involved, among other things, collecting, tracking, using and sharing certain personal data of consumers who interact with our webpages or application. The protection of the privacy of consumers’ data is a topic of heightened national political and commercial attention in a rapidly-changing landscape. The developments resulting from this heightened attention include, in addition to the legal and regulatory changes discussed in greater detail elsewhere in this “Risk Factors” section, numerous actual and potential actions by private entities to protect consumers’ data