You know you are getting old when:

[vitanola]

The "a car for every niche" mentality of The Fifties was exactly the reason the Edsel was created -- and exactly the reason it failed. Ford assumed they needed a car between the Ford and the Mercury that would be targeted explicitly to "the young executive on his way up," but in all their market research and psychological testing, it never occured to them that the young executive on his way up might not actually need or want such a car, and that there was in fact no such niche that needed to be filled. The reach of the Boys was about to exceed its grasp.

The Edsel affair is often treated as a joke, ha ha ha, weren't they dumb-looking cars anyway -- but it was, in fact, a turning point for the American auto industry, and it's unfortunate that its lessons haven't been well absorbed.

Is there *really* any substantial difference between Ford, GMC, Chevy or Dodge trucks? Other than the brand Calvin happens to be peeing on at any moment?

Of the FIFTIES? That was nothing compared to the GM "Companion Make" program back in the 1920's. Chevrolet was at the bottom, followed by Ponitac, then Oakland, then Viking, then Oldsmobile, then Marquette, then Buick, LaSalle and finally Cadillac.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Concealed running boards were the beginning of the end of good automotive design in America.

 

[vitanola]

Concealed running boards were the beginning of the end of good automotive design in America.

INDUBITABLY!

 

[Zombie_61]

...As to keys ... Yeah, I declined the lock guy's offer to duplicate the ignition key for (gulp) 70 bucks...

The battery in the all-in-one-key-and-fob for my truck died last year. The "geniuses" at Honda were apparently unable to design a plastic housing for the fob that didn't need a small metal screw to keep it closed. After nine years of use (at that time) the screw has apparently become one with the rest of the assembly, and even the technicians at the dealership were unable to get it to break loose so that I could replace the battery. But they were more than willing to order a replacement for which I'd have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $250. Fortunately my wife rarely drives my truck and the battery in her key still works, so we swapped keys. I'm not looking forward to the day the battery in this key dies.

Concealed running boards were the beginning of the end of good automotive design in America.

I agree. Running boards are elegant and practical, and now we get to pay extra for them...if they're an available option, that is.

 

[tonyb]

... Running boards are elegant and practical, and now we get to pay extra for them...if they're an available option, that is.

Got running boards on the Toyota Sienna van. I haven't, in the year or so we've had this vehicle, found much practical use for them. I've kicked the heels of my shoes against 'em a time or three, to knock off dirt and mud. I suppose if I ever put anything on the roof rack they might come in handy. I've noted that few of these second-generation Sienna vans have running boards, regardless of version (LE, CE, XLE, LGBT) or "trim level." So they were apparently a stand-alone option for which few buyers opted.

 

[vitanola]

Well, get yourself an Oldsmobile Limited and you can have two running boards on each side. You need them to climb up into this behemoth, which runs on 43" x 5" tires, and stands seven feet tall at the belt line!

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
I don't even wanna think about the brakes.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

The president's limousine has running boards for the Secret Service guards to stand on and handles for them to hang on to.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The running boards on the Plodge are just the right size to rest a heavy briefcase full of junk on when I'm trying to find my keys. Who could think getting rid of that was a good idea?

 

[Zombie_61]

Got running boards on the Toyota Sienna van. I haven't, in the year or so we've had this vehicle, found much practical use for them...

Some of our friends, who are aging right along with us, have bad knees. Since I drive more often than not when my wife and I go out with them, the running boards make it easier for them to get into my truck (a 2007 Honda Ridgeline).

 

[BlueTrain]

In the early days, many car makers did not have a lot of different models in their line-up. So when GM had five or six divisions, the cars did not compete with each other so much. But when more and more really different models were introduced, probably beginning in the early 1960s when the first American compact cars came out, the result was a degree of duplication. But I still believe there was a certain amount of brand loyalty as well as product differentiation by the makers to maintain some differences. The engines were different, for example, which was probably the biggest difference.

There has also been a remarkable similarity between cars from different companies, so much so that you might think that all the designers went to the same school at the same time. I realize also that some people keep saying "why do they keep changing things." The obvious answer is another question: "when were they perfect?" That translates to when were you eighteen years old? Or in other words, when had real progress ceased?

There have been competing schools of thought about what constituted the best sort of basic car. On the one hand, you have what Miss Lizzie suggested, small and presumably efficient four-cylinder engine and a five speed transmission. There is another school of thought that believes a large straight six with a three speed transmission and in a larger car, would be a more practical solution and there have been such cars. Black sidewalls, no ashtray and a very basic trim level. I'm not sure if there are such cars today, although there might be a basic work truck, invariably white, somewhere on the back of the dealer's lot that comes close.

 

[Fading Fast]

You miss my point, Miss Lizzie. There were in fact different niches to be filled and my point was that GM, mainly, simply vacated those niches in the name of industrial efficiency. Critics of the automotive industry, meaning Detroit and no where else, weren't in the business of making money by building cars. Once those niches were empty, they were filled by foreign competition. There's more to the automotive industry than efficient factories. But that's only part of the story, of course. The dealer network is a critical element.

Cars are as subject to fads and fashion as anything else. At one time, critics said American cars changed too often. The word was planned obsolescence, the way computer software is today. They did in fact introduce new models every year. But now, the complaint is that they don't keep up because imported models are constantly being updated. Of course, I understand that the critics job is to criticize. It's a tough job, I imagine.

This so-called badge engineering happened in other countries, too, of course, usually with the same results. A critic can easily say that all that is happening is that they're selling the same car with a different grille and a different trim inside and out under different names. But they do manage sometimes to produce a different car one way or another and in any event, there is a degree of brand loyalty that accounts for all of that happening. What you don't know is how strong that loyalty is.

So, a person who buys, say, a Pontiac, wouldn't even think of buying a Buick, much less a Dodge or a Ford. What cars do you imagine people who bought Mercury's or Plymouth's are driving.

Gee, our old LaSalle ran great; those were the days.

The question remains, though, did those niches exist of their own accord or did they exist because the Boys created them? Operationally and for every practical purpose, there was no difference between a Pontiac and an Oldsmobile. Plymouth overlapped Dodge which overlapped DeSoto which overlapped Chrysler. In Canada, you could buy a Dodge which was actually a Plymouth with only the grillwork and the trim changed. The engine and running gear were identical, as were the body stampings. My "Plodge" is one of these, and the only reason it existed was because Chrysler Canada wanted to market a Dodge at that particular price point to lure customers onto their lots. There was no particular public demand for this, so they created one thru advertising. This sort of thing was even more common postwar, as Keats and Packard emphatically point out in "The Insolent Chariots" and "The Waste Makers."

IMHO, both of you are correct to a degree. Of course the models overlapped - that's one way competition works as it drives competitors to, sometimes, make incremental improvements or create small niche offerings that satisfies a small area of demand. So the products seem and are similar, but have some differences that matter to some people.

And The Boys from Marketing are neither as powerful as I think Lizzie sometimes gives them credit for - they fail at creating demand for many, many things (Edsels, as Lizzie describes in detail why, New Coke and all the thousands, literally thousands, of products that fail each year) - nor as innocuous as some would say - they do create demand for many things by being astute about human nature / emotions / etc.

But, so what, people are free not to play. No car company ever put a gun to a customer's head to buy a more expensive car. My dad never paid up for a feature he didn't want if it was optional (I assure you of that). And, to be fair, I have found that sometimes advertisers / marketers create something I didn't think of, but am really glad they did. Heck, I love whip cream in aerosols cans - don't care what you say, don't care if they are overpriced, I enjoy it.

Like it or hate it - marketing is a part of personal freedom because, at its core, marketing is a sole proprietor putting up a sign on his apple cart saying his prices are lower / his apples are fresher / his cart is cleaner. Deny Ford the right to advertise the Edsel or Pepsi the right to tell some Millennial why this "natural" sweetener is better than that one and you deny that apple-cart vendor the right to his hand-printed cardboard sign. Adults need to be responsible for themselves and see through the advertising game. That said, I think we need stronger truth in advertising laws to prevent the "soft" fraud that is currently allowed. I'm fine with emotional, data-driven, what-have-you advertising - I'm a grown up - but lying or aggressively misleading is fraud in my book and should be illegal.

So do I. Have you SEEN the two cars?

1941 Packard:
View attachment 74325



1947 Ford:

View attachment 74326

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

 

[BlueTrain]

I imagine that it's sometimes difficult to separate downright lies from the hyperbole that advertising has always included. Much advertising is very subtle, too. Think of the Ralph Lauren advertisements that depict a group of very well dressed young men and woman (and older folks, too) lounging on the lawn in front of a Newport mansion. Advertising like that is selling a lifestyle that you can buy into just by buying his clothes. It isn't that easy in real life, although to sure, there are people who really live like that. Whether they wear Ralph Lauren clothing is another matter.

Thoreau once commented that the Indians living around there observed the Yankees (Indians were not Yankees, I guess) in their industriousness making things and selling them to other Yankees. The Indians could make baskets and so did but the Yankees failed to buy them. The Indian failed to realize that he had to make the Yankee buy his basket, having thought that once he made the basket, it was the Yankee's obligation to buy his baskets.

Our discussions of such matters are greatly simplified, of course, and do not mention other economic events and trends that effect what people do. Marketing people make mistakes all the time. If the Edsel took ten years of marketing studies, the results may have been outdated by the time the car was in the dealer's showroom, if it was ever accurate. So fast reaction to market conditions are necessary, among other things. Right after the war, nobody had bought a new car for years and people, some of them anyway, had a lot of saved up money. The big factories were trying to get back into producing cars instead of trucks and tanks. It was a good opportunity for a new company and at least a couple of new car companies began production. One was Kaiser, probably the best known. They did all right for a while but finally gave up. The last Kaiser was made, I think, in 1953. But Jeeps are descended from that company.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There's a big difference between advertising and the kind of "motivational research" marketing that became common around the early 1950s, based on the teachings of Freudian pyschologist-turned-adman Ernest Dichter. Dichter's teachings absolutely revolutionized the way advertising worked in the US. Ordinary advertising is informative -- here is the product, here are its advantages. Motivational research-based marketing is manipulative -- here is the product, you know deep down that you are sexually inadequate but purchasing this product will allow you to compensate for that.

Don't snicker. That's a very simplified example, but in essence that's exactly what they were doing, and they had volumes and volumes of white-coat research which they would swear their lives by to back it all up. Pretty much every car sold in America from the mid-1950s onward was marketed on the basis of such research, and they knew *exactly* what they were doing when they did it. It's one thing to convince someone to buy something on the basis of its advantages over other competing products. It's quite another to reach into the basest impulses of their minds and twist them into doing it -- without them ever realizing it.

 

[BlueTrain]

Oh, yes, I agree completely. It comes through in so many advertisements and commercials. It is an appeal to very natural impulses and desires, although I'm sure it predates the 1950s. You wouldn't have to do any market research to create an advertisement to appeal to one's desire to have something "manly" or sexy or powerful or anything like that. Not all of them would apply necessarily to buying a car, of course.

There is still the question that will forever be argued about as to just how effective advertising is. Not subliminal advertising but all advertising. It is expensive, of course, or can be. Television just inhales money. But I've also heard a story about how someone couldn't understand why Coca-Cola had a sign on every post and building in town when another brand didn't. The question was based on the idea that everybody knew about Coca-Cola, so why advertise it so much. Well, Coca-Cola is still around and the other brand is history. That's why.

It goes without saying that sometimes the advertising fails. You can probably recall advertisements that were so clever and well done that you almost never noticed the product at all. It also goes without saying that before market research and advertising was merely there to give you information, the information may not have been exactly straightforward, honest and without exaggeration. The expression "There's a sucker born every minute" dates from the 1800s (and not from P.T. Barnum, who supposedly had a very low regard for fakery and false advertising.

 

[Haversack]

It is well to remember that modern advertising and propaganda are pretty much one and the same. They are both designed to make their audience feel a particular way about a particular subject. And consider the overlap in the career of David Ogilvy. He went from working for Gallup to working for the British Security Coordination to founding Ogilvy & Mather. (The BSC was a covert organization for shaping US public opinion to be pro-British in years before the US joined WWII.)

 

[BlueTrain]

You make it sound like it's wrong to try and make someone think what you want them to think.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Only The Bad Guys do things like that. The propaganda tells me so.

 

[Haversack]

It depends on the methodology and means. Persuasion can run the gamut from the rubber hose to skilled oratory to subliminal and omnipresent images. They are not morally equivalent.

 

[Fading Fast]

There's a big difference between advertising and the kind of "motivational research" marketing that became common around the early 1950s, based on the teachings of Freudian pyschologist-turned-adman Ernest Dichter. Dichter's teachings absolutely revolutionized the way advertising worked in the US. Ordinary advertising is informative -- here is the product, here are its advantages. Motivational research-based marketing is manipulative -- here is the product, you know deep down that you are sexually inadequate but purchasing this product will allow you to compensate for that.

Don't snicker. That's a very simplified example, but in essence that's exactly what they were doing, and they had volumes and volumes of white-coat research which they would swear their lives by to back it all up. Pretty much every car sold in America from the mid-1950s onward was marketed on the basis of such research, and they knew *exactly* what they were doing when they did it. It's one thing to convince someone to buy something on the basis of its advantages over other competing products. It's quite another to reach into the basest impulses of their minds and twist them into doing it -- without them ever realizing it.

No snicker at all - I agree. But I still say, so what? It works on some, some of the time; other times, it fails. And sometimes, as Blue Train notes, it's just good old fashion putting up a sign. None of that - the emotional appeal, the subliminal stuff, the play off your fears - bothers me as adults need to build the skills to think for themselves and recognize advertising for what it is. Adults need to build the skills to see when companies are trying to play mind games with them / trying to push their emotional and impulsive buttons. But I will stand arm and arm against the "softly" fraudulent - the walk the legal line deceptive - advertising that goes on everyday and is practiced by many companies.

Working in finance, there are much, much stricter rules on how products and services can be advertised and it helps keep the industry's advertising much more honest. You can still do all the emotional stuff - hence, all the good looking older couples vacationing in beautiful places or driving nice cars down pretty lane as a narrator talks about the benefits of planing for retirement with the help of fill-in-the-blank company's services - but deceive about the product's or service's capabilities, structure, guarantees, etc. (the way regular companies do all the time) or lie about the fees and the SEC will be all over the company.

Adults need to have self control, but fraud is different. I can cajole you to buy my product with every emotional appeal I want, but my description of that product - its capabilities, reliability, warranty, risks, limitations, cost, fees, etc. - should have to be honest by law.