Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [34]
But it was even worse than I thought. Each of these brand managers, with the attendant “product” and “marketing” people below them, then had to do something. Given the industry reality of shared platforms and drivetrains, how could they engender some new, wonderfully unique product for their brands? Sorting it all out became a near-insurmountable task for Product Planning, the group that translates Marketing’s wants into an actionable product description to guide the designers and engineers.
To establish a degree of order and consistency, a “check the box” set of visual requirements was ultimately established for each “make” (Chevrolet, Buick, etc.), and each of the “brands” (Cavalier, Malibu, etc.) within that make that would share them. The focus, then, was not on design excellence but, rather, on the presence of certain “brand characteristics.” Thus, every Chevrolet was to have a huge, chrome “whisker” across the front end. (The idiotic fallacy behind this was that the Chevrolet truck buyers loved the appearance of their vehicles, including the wide chrome band. So, the reasoning went, if we make the cars look more like the trucks, people will start loving the cars, too. Didn’t work.)
All Pontiacs were to have plastic body cladding, lumpy and unappealing as it might have been. A further Pontiac “brand characteristic” was headrests that were like padded rectangular picture frames, with nylon mesh forming the inside. All Chevrolets, and only Chevrolets, were to have five-spoke wheels . . . no other GM make could. I wonder if anyone let the competitors know, as five-spoke alloy wheels are a fairly general configuration. The cruelest visual fate was reserved for Saturn. The brand management rocket scientists had divined that Saturn buyers were not “car” people; they cared more about friendly, gentle dealers and good service. These buyers received the label “postmodern,” in that they cared only about the transportation value of the car, and not, presumably, its appearance.Thus, it was solemnly decreed that the proper brand characteristic of Saturn would be . . . no character! Total blandness was to rule, and this article of faith explains a number of Saturn sedans, as well as the first-generation Vue small SUV, that had no front-end identification and no grille, but simply a sort of gaping air intake. Since “postmodern” buyers presumably didn’t like useless adornment of any kind, there was no chrome brightwork on the cars, resulting in an overall impression of depressing cheapness, much like a person wearing an ill-fitting burlap suit.
Personnel-heavy, bureaucratic, detail-focused, wasteful, unworkable, and absolutely guaranteed to produce lousy results, “brand management” was one of the first things I wanted to see destroyed when I returned to GM.
The imposition of brand management was the final straw, the element that was to doom GM’s North American cars to a no-win level of mediocrity. GM’s European and Latin American operations, unburdened by the MBA-driven bureaucracy of the home base, fared much better overall. And the North American truck group, single-mindedly focused on creating a better pickup than Ford or Dodge (and that same culture is evident among the “truck guys” in the other two companies), largely ignored the politically correct marketing dictums and just forged ahead, producing one smash-hit sport-utility and full-size pickup after another. Their success and profitability, in an era of economic expansion and low fuel cost, largely masked the disastrous state of the passenger-car side of the business. An overfocus on trucks was a dangerous thing. Sensitive to economic cycles and fuel prices, the truck market suddenly collapsed in 2008 before most of the new and competitive passenger cars had rolled out, triggering GM’s ultimate financial distress.
By the turn of the century, GM had become a sort of bad joke. It was widely credited (by those who cared) for its excellent trucks, but reputations of car companies are based