#branding

I still remember the day my parents bought me a copy of the iconic Justification for Higher Education poster. I had been nagging them for a while, and when I finally got the poster, it took immediate pride of place in my childhood bedroom. Having matured, I recognize now that the imagery depicts a lifestyle unlikely to be the preserve of the highly educated, but instead that of a lottery winner. Didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter today; the now ratty old poster followed me to college and again to my grown-up domicile.

Toyota’s Lexus brand is going into the luxury consumer goods business by opening the first Intersect By Lexus store in The Aoyoma district of Tokyo at the end of the month. Lexus hopes that selling things like Italian leather bags will improve the Toyota luxury brand’s image, particularly outside the United States, where Lexus has been successful. Other Intersect By Lexus stores will open in Dubai and New York City.

GM wants to move Opel upmarket (again,) to allow more breathing space for Chevrolet in Europe, Reuters reports. Frustrated Opel dealers say GM needs to declare what it wants, and stick with it for a change.

When the NSX was last available for sale, the rest of the world knew it as a Honda product. But now that the next-generation NSX is intended to be a flagship for the Acura brand, Honda has run into a small problem – Acura doesn’t exist in much of the world.

PSA announced their renewed brand strategy for their Peugeot and Citroen lines, and the situation has finally been clarified after frequent back and forth reports that contradicted one another. It turns out that PSA will employ a three-tier approach that is equally confusing, with Citroen as the lowest tier with Peugeot on top. But then there’s also Citroen’s DS line, which is supposed to be upscale itself. Confused? So are we.

The Chinese-Israeli co-production Qoros has not sold a single car yet, but it already finds itself in the legal hot seat. Via a temporary injunction of a court in Hamburg, Germany, Audi precluded Qoros from using – the letter Q.

Hey Sajeev,

While watching the Mecum auto auctions recently, a beautiful Plymouth GTX came thru on the auction block. It got me thinking about the rash of brand-icide we’ve seen these past ten or so years. As they pass, others come in.

Infiniti has decided to abandon its current alphanumeric strategy for…an all-new alphanumeric strategy whereby passenger cars are given the “Q” designation, and crossovers and SUVs are dubbed the “QX”.

Some of you may remember the “No Audi” signs at U.S. parking garages at the height of the unintended acceleration craze of the late 80s. In a garage in China, one can see the reverse: Only Audis, other cars go elsewhere.

If you want to make cars in China, you need a joint venture partner. The Chinese joint venture partners have done well. 98 percent of last year’s sales of central government-owned Dongfeng came from joint ventures with Nissan, Honda, and Peugeot. Largest Chinese automaker SAIC derives 60 percent of its sales from made-in-China GM and Volkswagen cars.

That policy “is like opium. Once you’ve had it you will get addicted forever,” said former machinery and industry minister, He Guangyuan.

GM has blamed Western Europe location for Opel’s woes, unions, the economy. Opel has a brand crisis, and the crisis is “a self inflicted-wound,” says Christiaan Hetzner, Reuters’ man in Frankfurt, Germany, in an article on why Opel is in so much trouble. “Reputation is seen as the problem, not cars.” The recent attempts to move the Opel brand up-market ripped those old wounds open and could kill the patient.

Car companies the world over get in line to spend $185,000 (for starters) to register their brands as what is called a “Top Level Domain” or TLD. Instead of, say “Chevrolet.com,” in the future, you will be able to type only “Chevrolet” to get to the site. Google allows you to do the same right now, but also gives you a long list of other choices.

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”.

“There’s only one word that’s banned in our company: brand,” Mr. Dyson said, speaking at “Disruption By Design,” a conference put on by Wired on Tuesday. “We’re only as good as our latest product. I don’t believe in brand at all.”

I agree with Dyson. Brand is an utterly obnoxious word. Brand really just means “reputation”. As we’ve seen before, “building your brand” without any substance behind it will be immediately exposed as fraudulent. But brands still matter.

With the government still waiting to see how much it will get out of its equity in General Motors, The General seems to be attracting more of the media commentary than Chrysler these days. And not without good reason: GM saw the greatest drop in market share last month of any Detroit automaker, its government-hyped Volt is flopping, Opel continues to be an open sore and it can’t help but flaunt its cluelessness about youth marketing. But interest in GM’s shortcomings seems to be driven by little more than election-year political implications, which Chrysler was able to avoid by borrowing cash and misleadingly claiming to have squared up with the American taxpayer. After all, Chrysler is facing just as many challenges as GM, if not more. And despite having formally closed the bailout chapter of its history, Chrysler’s performance still bears on the decision to rescue America’s weakest major automaker.