At some point contributor Area Man will reveal his cyclical theory of everything, which basically holds that every five years new management teams throw out the strategies of the past five years and proceed to do the opposite. Supporting both that idea and our earlier thesis that General Motors is managed by people disconnected from reality, the company has announced that it will be supplementing the brand badges on its vehicles (Chevy, Buick, Saab, etc) with two chrome “GM” tags.

“‘Research tells us that many of our most outstanding segment-leading vehicles are not associated by the customer to be part of the GM portfolio,’ Mark LaNeve, GM’s North American vice president of sales, service and marketing, said in a statement.”

I’m pretty sure that most Saab drivers want to pretend that their cars are made in Sweden by quirky Nordic types instead of Ohio (the upcoming 9-7 SUV), Japan (the 9-2), and Austria. Letting them know that it comes from the company responsible for the Pontiac Aztek is a negative, not positive, association.

The same holds true domestically. The whole point of the muliplicity of GM divisions was to target the products — generally held to be a good thing. Pontiac = performance, Caddy = luxury, and so on (no one knew what Olds was, which helped kill it off, and Buick is headed the same direction). When the lines start to blur — look up “Cadillac Cimmaron” to see what happened when GM pimped out a Chevy and tried to sell it — failure results. Acura, Lexus, and Infiniti are deliberately decoupled from Honda, Toyota, and Nissan, despite the far more positive opinion most consumers have of those brands than GM.

This news came on the same day that Holman Jenkins wrote in a WSJ op-ed that “All these (new GM) cars are decent or even better than decent by every standard except the best of what GM’s competitors have on offer — such as riskier styling, meatier engines, and more advanced transmissions … deep-sixing Zeta (a significant new platform, just cancelled) was GM’s way of saying it will devote the rest of the decade to non-wow products.”

The name “General Motors” may “speak to people,” as LaNeve said, but only in a 50 mile radius around Detroit. Everywhere else it means nothing, or worse, has negative associations. And things are only going to get worse if GM is killing new products and only producing boring ones. With that perceptual payload, sticking a company badge on every GM car is a really bad idea. The thought process must be “it may not make sense, but at least it’s a different approach!”

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2005 at 12:01 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, How Not To Succeed In Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.