I’m a car guy, although sadly one without the resources to fill his driveway with exotics. In fact just to get my one and only vehicle into my tiny garage I have to perform an intricate backing up maneuver, with the odds of knocking off a wing mirror or two standing at about 50/50. But budget aside I do love cars and always have, so it’s no surprise that I’m interested in automotive marketing.
For those of us used to instant gratification, the multi-year process of designing and marketing a car would surely be an excruciating test of patience. Marketing’s job here is really hard, because it has to be far-sighted with respect to what the customer will want, yet operate in the context of current realities.
So it’s probably unfair of me to take issue with what marketers have sought to do in the automotive world: gain more influence.
It used to be that entrepreneurs, engineers and designers created cars, and marketing’s role came after the fact (it was tasked with selling what had already been created). The engineers’ and designers’ roles were very much about the stamp of the individual, to the extent that for any car geek names such as Battista (”Pinin”) Farina and Giorgetto Giugiaro (I’ll take a 1970s Lotus Esprit, thanks) are almost as significant as the marques for which their work was commissioned. Similarly, much of their focus was on innovation, not for its own sake but for the shared goal of advancing the industry. That may be my rose-tinted view, but even still it sits in stark contrast to today’s world, in which cars are contrived to be “category defining” and to appeal to meticulously targeted demographic groups.
It’s obviously a smart strategy to give marketing (if not always actual marketers) a role further up the food chain. After all, what company can risk the giant bet of designing a car from scratch driven only by talent, instinct and gut feeling? Far better to apply some dispassionate market analysis up front. But I was chatting with a friend who’s far more knowledgeable about cars than I, and neither of us could come up with a single vehicle on the market for which we truly felt passion. What’s available has been planned to the extent that it feels utterly contrived and I feel that by buying in the joke will be on me.
Removing budget parameters doesn’t make things any easier, even though I’m initially tempted by Aston Martins and Maseratis and their ilk. But then I remember that when you start up a modern Aston it displays the words “Power, Beauty, Soul” in sequence within the instrument display, and that the new Granturismo is built to accommodate precisely the extra large hedge fund manager, not the svelte Italian playboy. I’d rather have an Aston from the brutal ’70s / early 80s aristocratic muscle car era, which included a year in which the company sold only 30 cars and all-but imploded, and I think borrowed the steering wheel from Ford’s Crown Victoria. And the Maserati I want is one of the 30 or so 5000 GTs custom built for various plutocrats between 1959 and 1965. These are irrational choices by any measure.
You see what’s missing now is individualism on both sides of the equation. Cars are created by means of a more scientific model of marketing, more reliably approach their market and as a consequence lose the raw appeal that comes from identifying some part of you in the designer’s vision.
Perhaps what I’m really saying is that the further up the food chain marketing gets, the more effective and accurate it likely becomes, but it does so in a way that reaches someone who’s like you, but not quite.
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