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90 Oldsmobile

How the ‘King of Chrome’ ended up on the scrap heap

Oldsmobile is among the brand legends in US car history. Conceived in 1897, it was one of the five core brands manufactured by General Motors (GM) – the other four being Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick and Cadillac – and helped lead the company to a 57 per cent share of the US car market by the middle of the last century.

For decades, Oldsmobile was a pioneering brand. In the 1920s, it became known as the ‘King of Chrome’ because it was the first car with chrome-plated trim. A decade later it became the first production line car in the US with a fully automatic transmission. In 1966, it introduced a car with front wheel drive.

However, in more recent times Oldsmobile has lost its pioneering edge. GM famously decided that instead of preserving and accentuating the unique identity of each of its brands it would increase its profits ‘through uniformity’. As a result, Oldsmobiles began to look very similar to other GM cars, with only small, superficial differences.

In 1983 a Fortune magazine article highlighted the growing homogeny of the GM brands by including a photograph of an Oldsmobile alongside a Chevrolet, a Buick and a Pontiac. The article’s headline was, ‘Will Success Spoil General Motors?’, but it may as well have been, ‘Spot the Difference’. The article described GM’s new state-of-the-art assembly plant at Orion, Michigan:

The $600-million plant bristles with robots, computer terminals, and automated welding equipment, including two massive $1.5 million Ploogate systems that align and weld assemblies of body panels. Unmanned forklifts, guided by wires buried in the floor, will carry parts directly from loading docks. In its flexibility, Orion sets new standards for GM plants.

But while GM’s technology may have been cutting edge, the values associated with the Oldsmobile brands were anything but. An article in the Detroit News in May 2002 explained the problem the Detroit-based company faced in the 1980s and 1990s:

GM’s historic brand strategy, pioneered by chairman Alfred Sloan in the 1920s, counted on consumers methodically moving up the ladder of affluence from Chevrolet to Buick to Oldsmobile to Cadillac. The game plan worked when GM built distinct cars for every division, but fell apart when the company slapped different nameplates on essentially the same vehicles. A solid, but staid Oldsmobile has little appeal to consumers enamoured with sleek Audi sedans or Toyota’s elegant Lexus luxury cars.

Loyalty, instead of enthusiasm, drew consumers to GM showrooms. The average age of owners of Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac drifted into the mid-60s.

Towards the end of the 1990s, GM unveiled a new branding strategy to combat this lack of enthusiasm. The idea was to focus more on specific models rather than the brand division. Within the Oldsmobile range, GM launched the Alero, Aurora and Intrigue models in an attempt to catch up with its slicker rivals. Although the new cars received various positive reviews within the automotive press, and an intensive marketing drive that included strategic appearances in The X-Files, they failed to capture the share of the younger market they were designed to attract.

At the end of 2000, GM made what must have been a painful, if unavoidable decision to gradually phase out the Oldsmobile brand. The Oldsmobile collector’s models mark the end of production. From 2004, no future Oldsmobile models will be manufactured.

Since the decision was made, marketing experts have been conducting post-mortems of the brand to see what exactly went wrong. One mistake that has been highlighted repeatedly is GM’s attempt to strip the brand of its old-fashioned connotations. This was always going to be difficult for a car that predates Ford and even has the word ‘old’ within its name.

GM tried to get round this problem by launching an advertising campaign based around the slogan, ‘This is not your father’s Oldsmobile’.