The Future Of Car Brands: Scooters
If you exist outside the fast-paced world of the automotive branding community, you might believe that the point of car brands is to sell cars. Needless to say, you’d be wrong. The big buzzword around car brands, particularly the more niche and eco-friendly brands is “mobility.” As in “we must leverage our brand values to provide a broad-based mobility strategy for the cities of the future.” Or, to put it into layman’s terms, “screw cars, we gotta start building scooters.”
We’d heard that Smart was headed in this direction, and given that Mercedes is moving into its traditional brand space with ever-smaller, cheaper FWD cars, we reckoned scooters were as logical a direction for the brand as any other. But MINI? Granted, BMW is cannibalizing its small car sub-brand with as much abandon as Mercedes, but MINIs are cars. Not Chinese Vespa knock-offs with MINI branding. If this trend isn’t nipped on the bud quick-smart, the Aston Martin Cygnet is going to end up being the most prophetic car of the decade. [via Autocar]
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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One of the best branding ads I've ever seen was Honda's with all their products being used by a couple. Very impressive and I've always wondered why they are almost the only manufacturer that seems to extend their brand to logical ends, no patio furniture, no mortgages!
Peugeot also manufactures scooters. This mobility thing reminds me the "change" of oil companies to energy companies.