Yahoo Autos Build the Brand, Burn the Brand
"Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and he can sleep until noon." The quote is attributed to Mark Twain, but I heard it from my father about twice a week for much of my teens and twenties. Dad was hoping to sell me on the idea of getting to work on time, no matter how briefly, but his efforts were in vain; I acquired a reputation as a late starter in pretty much every job I've ever held, including this one. My entire race team, consisting of no fewer than eleven people, made a secret agreement to lie to me about the time for the driver's meeting at an endurance race earlier this year, just so I'd be there on time. The irony was that I'd resolved to be on time for the driver's meeting, so I showed up half an hour early. Needless to say, I'll never make that mistake again.
A few years ago, I returned to motorcycling in an effort to speed up my commute and thus get back five or ten of the working minutes I lose to the snooze (button) every morning. It also causes me to pay a little more attention on the road, which is good. You look around at each stoplight and try to figure out which one of the sleepy drivers around you is going to make an entirely inadvertent attempt on your life in the near future. Last Wednesday, I found myself surrounded by Mercedes-Benzes. There was a GLC-something, a GLE-something, an older ML, and a remarkably ratty-looking GL450. All four of them were colored something between dark silver and light grey, and all four of them were driven by about the same person. And it was right then that I realized: the automakers have been reading their Mark Twain.
Few products in human history have been as traditionally dependent on branding as the automobile-there was no equivalent of the "Sloan Plan" in agricultural feedstock or mortar ammunition-but some time shortly after the turn of the century we stepped well and truly through the looking glass when it comes to the disconnect between reality and manufactured perception in the car market. As recently as thirty years ago, most automakers were vertically-integrated enterprises that engineered everything from seatbelt buckles to engine control computers in-house. Each of them had a unique corporate culture that led to unique engineering decisions.
Consider, if you will, the following products from 1984: the Porsche 911, the Mercedes-Benz 240D, the Chevrolet Celebrity, the Ford LTD, the Audi 5000, the Volvo 240, the Jaguar XJ6, the BMW 318i, the Toyota Corolla, and the Honda Accord. These were core products for the companies in question, and they were vastly, self-evidently different. In many cases, the target market and the basic problems to be solved were the same, but the answers that each manufacturer provided were unique to their own culture. I'm not talking about "brand DNA" signifiers like a console-mounted ignition switch or ribbed taillights; I'm talking about the internal corporate priorities and processes that led to those decisions.
The rugged, often stubborn individualism that distinguished automakers from each other has been replaced.
Now look at the same list of manufacturers and cars, updated for 2016: Porsche Macan, Mercedes-Benz GLC, Chevrolet Equinox, Ford Escape, Audi Q5, Volvo XC60, Jaguar F-Pace, BMW X3, Toyota RAV4, Honda CR-V. The rugged, often stubborn individualism that distinguished automakers from each other has been replaced by the same bloodless pragmatism that causes Burger King franchisees to seek locations across the street from an existing McDonald's. The vertical integration that once let you distinguish a Ford from a GM product simply by touching an interior control surface with your eyes closed has been replaced with a slavish devotion to supplier strategies, faceless factories with names that remain buried from public notice until someone dies or sues: Takata, CTS, Continental, Denso.
A Stalin-esque purging of powertrain possibilities has left us with a mind-numbing same-scape of turbo four, turbo V6, turbo four, turbo V6, as far as the eye can see. Did you ever think the day would come when Jaguar, Porsche, and Audi all chose the same basic architecture for their core products? And all of stuffed to the brim with near-identical supplier-generated parts.
Faced with the necessity of foisting this generic crap on buyers, the automakers have resorted to strip-mining the exhausted seams of their anthracite heritage until not a single bit of history dust is left to sprinkle on their indistinguishable blob-mobiles. That heritage was laid in the same way that coal was: generations of authentic product lifecycles, unique and special vehicles compressed in memory until everybody knew what a Mercedes-Benz was, everybody could picture a Jaguar, even children could draw the basic shape of a Porsche. Now it is hauled out by the bucketload and dumped on the GLC, the F-Pace, the Macan.
This has happened elsewhere, of course, most notably in consumer electronics.
This has happened elsewhere, of course, most notably in consumer electronics. Once-proud names like Magnavox, Emerson, RCA, and Sylvania were bought and sold, slapped on anonymous overseas components. Every year the price was lowered and the specs became more pedestrian and fewer people remained who believed in the brand and the race to the bottom reached breakneck pace. Brands were disinterred and force-fit in senseless fashion: Memorex iPod accessories, anyone? My great-grandfather worked for RCA Victor eighty years ago, overseeing the product of Red Seal classical recordings in a manner so autocratic and obsessive that it literally killed him; today the RCA name is applied by TCL Electronics to random Chinese products in hopes that someone at Walmart will prefer it to the equally-degraded Sylvania name that appears on televisions built by Funai on the next shelf.
We all know what the next step is. Once China is ready to undertake the entire manufacture and design of crossovers to European quality standards, one of the major automakers will outsource the whole thing there. General Motors has already shown the way with their newest Buick, but since the tri-shield no longer carries much cachet in the United States it was pretty much the equivalent of slapping "RCA" on a Chinese television. The big move will happen when Porsche or Jaguar or BMW decides that it's okay to have their CUV-blobby thing done soup-to-nuts by a supplier.
The arguments for doing so will be irrefutable. We will be told that "heritage products" will continue to be made in Germany or Britain, and that might even be true for a while. But eventually the heritage products will disappear, because in the long run only an idiot or a fanatic would pay big money for a bespoke car with a badge that also appears on a Chinese crossover. And just like that-poof!-all that history, all that heritage, will be meaningless, no more relevant to our children than the history of RCA or Magnavox is to us.
It takes a long time to build a brand, but a short time to burn it. No early-rising reputation can survive years of coming in to work at noon. The modern mindset on these matters comes straight from Janet Jackson: "What have you done for me lately?" If what you're doing is building blobs just like everybody else's blobs, no amount of heritage or branding will save you from eventually being viewed as a blobmaker. And blobmaking isn't going to be a profitable occupation in twenty years. You've been warned, the same way my father warned me. And, I fear, with the same amount of effectiveness.
Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.
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