Auto rants (3)
June 10, 2010
It’s been a year, and now I am (and the rest of you out there are, too) a part-owner of General Motors. Wish there were better news for the future, but it looks like they still don’t get it. Today’s New York Times reports that for “consistency” we will now have to refrain from calling anything Chevrolet a “Chevy.” The marketing people are behind this mandate which they see as a brand-strengthening move.
Last year I made it pretty clear (in Kick as Kick Can and Auto Rants (2)) that the problem with Chevrolet as a brand isn’t that people use a diminutive and endearing term once promoted by GM (Dinah Shore sang it long before they were driven to the levee). The problem is that Chevrolet doesn’t refer to anything identifiable but rather to an incredible range of vehicles that start with a Chevrolet-branded Daewoo manufactured in Korea and proceed upward in size and power through the Corvette and a series of heavy-duty trucks.
Bob Lutz is gone from the hallways of General Motors, but this latest brain-dead solution to GM’s branding problems is a case of thinking ‘way down deep within the same old box. As Ford is in the process of recognizing with the proposed elimination of the Mercury brand, re-badging vehicles with multiple brands is counter-productive in today’s market. Ford would compete in the US market with *gasp* only two brands.
With a little help from my friends
September 8, 2009
In a quandary this morning. I can understand some things pretty easily, like how General Motors can claim that an electric car that has to be plugged in every 40 miles can get 230 miles to the gallon. I am, of course, a university-certified Marketing Wizard.
Other things I understand pretty easily include the idea that pine tar soap should help my scaly scalp condition. I can understand that because it’s one of those things that people just wouldn’t do if it wasn’t good for them…like mixing sulphur and molasses into a poultice and spreading it on an aching joint. That still leaves me with the problem of why the first guy with an itchy scalp thought it would be a nifty idea to spread pine pitch on his head; there are lots of other nasty things that you can apply to your head. Maybe he’d tried all of those. Which makes you kind of sure he was a social outcast.
But my problem today is that I just unwrapped a new bar of soap from the Dial soap people and I need help in understanding it. The wrapper claims that the soap is made with cranberries and is a great source of antioxidants. The scent is correct, although probably artificial. But why am I rubbing antioxidants on my outsides? Why couldn’t I just add a quart of Ocean Spray to my bath? Am I in danger of serving the Thanksgiving turkey with a slice of Dial on the side? Why is there no blueberry soap?
While I work on the answers to these questions, I offer you this image of the hawk spotted during yesterday morning’s walk. The birds in the neighborhood were all chattering, making sure he felt like an outcast.
Auto rants (Part 2)
July 14, 2009
Chrysler set a record for passage through bankruptcy, just in time for GM – a more complex financial beast – to emerge even more quickly: In on the First of June, out on the 10th of July. Three days later, Advertising Age asked the first-page rhetorical question “Is this the right guy to run GM’s marketing?’ next to a photo of Bob Lutz.
The answer to that question should have been clear from the July 14th Wall Street Journal headline advising that Mr. Lutz was toying with the idea of breathing some life into the almost-dead corpse of the Pontiac division by resurrecting the Chevrolet Caprice model name and putting it on the Pontiac G8.
The answer is no, Bob Lutz is not the right guy to run GM’s marketing.
He’s 77. He’s retired from GM once already. He is steeped in the tradition of the US automobile industry. The G8 fizzled after it’s 2007 introduction, but sales are picking up…so the logical conclusion is to make sure we hold on to this model, “citing nascent demand.”
In the depths of the Depression, Packard Motor Car company hired production and sales executives from General Motors because Packard didn’t understand how to make or sell a popularly-priced car to save their souls. It worked!
The equivalent in today’s market in which GM has been unable to sell automobiles profitably would be for GM to hire marketing and production executives from Toyota.
Mr. Lutz, you have to narrow the range of models offered by each of your surviving divisions, not broaden them; you have to reduce the overlap of models, not further confuse them.
Clarity, Mr. Lutz. Focus. One big winner, not a half-dozen stunted, resource-sucking minor models that you produce for inventory (not demand) and then have to liquidate.
The Goodby, Silverstein Corvette commercial…(Auto Rants (4))
July 15, 2010
My son wrote:
Hey Pops -
I’m totally loving this Corvette commercial… and I don’t like Chevy (sorry, Chevrolet) cars, nor have I ever been too fond of the Corvette. (If I’m going to buy an expensive sportscar, Chevy isn’t the first car company that comes to mind).
http://www.nitrobahn.com/news/2011-chevrolet-corvette-features-in-a-short-commercial/
To which I responded:
Well, it’s done by Goodby, Silverstein (think Got Milk?), so it’s well-crafted and hits on a good core idea. Unfortunately for them, their attempt at a Hal Riney voiceover doesn’t have the resonance of the real thing (the Reagan re-election campaign), so it’s not going to wear as well.
Also, they are counting on the fact that no one remembers that the original Corvette wasn’t conceived as “a rocket,” but rather a personal sports car (the Thunderbird was Ford’s entry). So the voiceover confounds the origins of the space program with the visuals of building today’s Corvette engine…eventually, I think, resulting in a sort of hollow, ho-hum feeling. But at low levels of repetition it will probably do well and they really aren’t interested in selling more Corvettes. It’s part of a larger GM – Chevrolet image campaign in preparation for their public stock offering tentatively planned for this fall.
But it’s fine for you to like it. Since you and I own GM, we should be pleased.
Pops
And then he went:
Now… obviously I understand that the Corvette was not a “rocket” in any way, shape or form as originally conceived (nor is it now), but those cars brought people closer to feeling the power of an engine – thus “rocket” – than ever before (if you didn’t have the money or means to ever own or see a classic European sports car), no?
At least it seems to me they’re successfully rewriting history
Bubba
p.s. We own GM what?!?
So I said:
When GM accepted the bail-out and went through bankruptcy, the US govt (hence, you and I) got controlling ownership of the company. Now the 55-year-old Charlie Wilson quote (“What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” he said) is really true.
If you go back and examine the word “rocket” with respect to GM, you’ll find that as part of the post-World War II design of the GM family of brands (Harley Earl’s brainchild), it was Oldsmobile that was promoted as “the Rocket,” with models like the Rocket 88 and the Rocket 98. The Oldsmobile overhead-cam V8 engine was nicknamed the “Rocket.”
The original Corvette first shown in 1953 was powered by a “souped-up” six-cylinder engine, but it wasn’t the engine that got the hype, it was the fact that it was the first US production automobile with a fiberglass body. So…no, the Corvette didn’t start out to be “a rocket.”
Pops
(See my earlier auto rants)
Filed in Commentary, Marketing
Tags: GM, Chevrolet, corvette, Goodby Silverstein, Hal Riney, commercial