#Marketing

Last week, Jalopnik ran a story bemoaning the loss of Joel Ewanick, complete with some appropriately DeLorean-esque winks towards possible conspiracy and a note that Mr. Ewanick just busted out a $1.4 million mortgage for a home in Detroit. This doesn’t seem like a good deal; surely $1.4 mil should get you, oh, I don’t know, 1,400 homes in Detroit.

What was so great about the guy who apparently green-lit “Chevy Runs Deep”? Perhaps a look into what GM once considered to be good marketing copy will offer some insight.

The latest chapter of the Joel Ewanick saga is unfolding courtesy of Bloomberg. Our long-suffering marketing chief appears to have been sacked in part because he committed the heinous crime of buying cheap furniture.

According to Toyota, if you don’t drive, you won’t get the girl. But at least a yarmulke-clad Jean Reno will help you out. No wonder so many young Japanese men are staying shut in their rooms.

How strange that on a day full of Joel Ewanick related news, an old face pops up at a crosstown rival.

Chevrolet is slowly launching the Spark subcompact in select markets across the United States, with more MTV/Viacom-derived “millenial focused” ad campaigns. But Chevrolet is being cagey, if not evasive, regarding projected sales.

Bloomberg is reporting that General Motors and Facebook are talking again, in an attempt to get GM to resume advertising on the social network. Meetings between GM CEO Dan Akerson and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg were being reported.

Just when we thought that Chevrolet couldn’t do enough to alienate their coveted “millennials”, the press release for the Chevrolet Spark just provides further evidence that the brand is trying way too hard to the point where it’s embarassing.

Video NSFW for language

Automotive News features one of the better breakdowns of automaker Facebook campaigns, minus the breathless masturbatory social media buzzwords that so frequently surround any discussion of “engagement” or “conversations” . The consensus seems to be shifting in one direction; it’s worthless, even if Mark Rechtin and David Barkholz are too polite to say so.

Consulting firm Alix Partners predicts a slowdown of U.S. auto sales. The study, reported at Reuters, cites the usual suspects, such as lingering high unemployment, increased costs and more people driving less. It then touches on something that is very basic, but often overlooked: Sales are driven by the number of potential buyers. If there are fewer buyers, there will be fewer buys. New cars are bought in certain age groups, usually somewhere at around 35 and up. As the boomers are going out to pasture, there simply will be fewer potential buyers.

Tesla’s 10 minute driving time limit at their Model S press events are leading some to cry foul – “how can a journalist reasonably evaluate the new EV without getting an idea of its battery range?”.

The bigger question is “what value do press trips really provide to the reader?”

Yesterday, I shared a Toyota Corona ad from the February 1969 issue of Playboy. I like the Corona for personal reasons, but if the Time Machine took me back to ’69 and I didn’t have a lot to spend (or even if I did have a lot to spend), the Datsun 510 would be one of my top choices. Wouldn’t you know, there’s an ad for the 510 in the very same issue!

A generous 24 Hours of LeMons racer gave me a copy of the February 1969 issue of Playboy as a gift last weekend, and it’s even more of a time capsule than most publications of its era. The only cars advertised in the issue are the Ford Mustang (Mach 1 and Shelby), Volkswagen Beetle, Datsun 510 (labeled as the “/2”), and the Toyota Corona. Since my very first car was a ’69 Corona, I felt compelled to share this ad.

My biggest fear with the seemingly inevitable departure of Dany Bahar was having to read the contempt and gloating of the automotive media’s self-appointed product and management experts, whereby they claim vindication for shitting on Dany Bahar’s vision to do something about Lotus and their lack of profitability and his desecration of sacred “brand values”.

With a few of our readers providing some particularly good insight into Acura’s ILX campaign based on their work in marketing, I’m submitting an ad for the TSX from 2009 for their consideration, as well as my own commentary.

The ad, like all ads today, is aspirational, not reflective. It is showing you something you want to be, not “a person like you would like these products.”

The rest of the article talks about a sort of “aspirational fantasy” (my term, not theirs). JC Penny is trying to do it in their ad (discussed in the article) and Acura is trying to do it here. The problem is they haven’t quite got it.