Patriot Games

There might be no better way to demonstrate the muscle of marketing than to look at how the auto industry creates and eliminates perceptions about products and brands. Marketers have perhaps the most important job in business operations: to create wants where they don’t exist, and to blur the line between wants and needs. The other business operations, accounting, finance, and economics, don’t mean anything if a company doesn’t create a product that is wanted and thus, returns a profit.

Many people believe that they need a car, and view it as a necessary and unavoidable expense. How then, did people happily survive for thousands of years before automobiles? Commercials and advertising have manufactured a want for automobiles, and once the consumer succumbs, they are exposed to even deeper tactics designed to create classes of cars that reflect the desired status of the driver. Most people would argue that a BMW is a “better” car than a Hyundai. Both of these cars will achieve the basic purpose of transportation (and much more). Both of these cars can achieve the legal speed limit. Both have seating for passengers and both can carry groceries home from the store. The perceptions between the two in people’s minds have been created by marketers.

To me, the most frustrating perception that advertising construes and contorts is a vehicles’ country of origin. Most people in this country have a foggy idea at best of which car companies are from what countries. Automakers from foreign countries benefit from a strong sense of national pride in their home markets. Italians are inclined to buy clothes made in Italy, by Italians, and sold in Italian stores because it will benefit their country. The same is true for cars. That Italian is more inclined to buy an Alfa Romeo than a Volkswagen because they feel patriotic when buying their country’s goods.

This sense of national pride when buying and driving an automobile exists in the U.S. among the aging generation that saw World War II come and go. This is a main reason why Lincoln and Cadillac are viewed as an old-person’s car. It is easy to understand why a veteran of WWII would be fiercely loyal to American automakers. They saw firsthand, Japanese and German pilots shooting at Americans with Mitsubishi and BMW built fighter planes, and watched German generals riding around in Mercedes-Benzes. When they returned home from war, they were justifiably more inclined to buy Chrysler, GM, or Ford products because those companies provided vehicles and planes to the victorious Allies.

The history of World War II is also linked to today’s hierarchy of automakers because of post-war rebuilding in the Axis countries. In an effort to help those countries recover from post-war recessions and turmoil, The U.S. implemented the Marshall Plan, which used American taxpayer money to rebuild the factories of German and Japanese manufacturing, including their auto factories. In the 1950s, Germans and Japanese auto companies were basking from the benefits of (at that time) state-of-the-art factories, while domestic companies were left to use factories built at the turn of the 18th century. Although recent studies have shown that American car companies have caught their foreign rivals in terms of quality, today’s buyers have an ingrained sense that foreign products are superior.

People of subsequent generations have lost that pride when buying a domestic vehicle. Today’s young professionals will largely only consider purchasing a German or Japanese luxury brand to demonstrate their new-found affluence. Some of this preference for imported brands is the fault of the American automakers by not offering competitive products for much of the last 20 years. But those foreign companies will always have a loyal and patriotic home market, something that we young Americans refuse to endow on our domestic makers.

Recently, some companies have begun to capitalize on America’s allegiance to anything not made in Detroit. Mini owners can have their Coopers emblazoned with England’s Union Jack on the roof of their cars. Volkswagen, with its new slogan, “German engineering,” is catering to this desire for import image. Let’s hope buyers of the Routan minivan don’t find out that, apart from the body panels and a few interior pieces, it’s a Chrysler Town and Country.
American cars would flourish in a fictional world where facts and performance numbers are rewarded with sales and regard. Unfortunately, with all the millions of dollars automakers throw at their marketers, I don’t see an end to the current perceptions of young automobile buyers.