Once upon a time, GM had five main brands - Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac. Alfred Sloan looked at Ford, the leading automaker at the time, and saw that Ford's marketing was one-size-fits-all. Sloan decided that he would segment the market and target each of his brands to one segment: Chevrolet for the common man, Pontiac for the college grad, up to Cadillac for the senior partner. By the 1930s, he had not only passed Ford, but had created the biggest industrial company in the world. And this strategy worked until the 1960s.
Then the lines between the brands got a bit blurry. By now, of course, all of GM's competition was doing market segmentation, and as each division tried to position itself against its competitors -- well, it wasn't so easy to tell the difference between a Buick and an Olds anymore (although Olds pushed the "Rocket 8" engine in their ads). John DeLorean stuffed an outsized engine into a Pontiac Tempest and created the first muscle car: the GTO. It sold well, but it changed Pontiac's brand, and it competed with Chevrolet's Corvette. Sloan would never have permitted it in 1950.
The one thing that killed the brand distinctions more than anything else came in 1977. It may come as a surprise, but the best-selling car in the US was the Olds Cutlass. The 350-cubic-inch engine for the Olds was similar to the Chevy 350, but not identical. The Olds engine plant could not keep up with demand, so GM quietly slipped some Chevy engines into the Cutlasses. Inevitably, someone tried to work on his own car, found that the Olds replacement parts did not fit -- and, oh, the screaming! Buyers pointed out that, if they'd wanted a Chevy, they'd have gone to a Chevy dealer -- and paid less. Some state Attorney Generals started talking about enforcing the truth-in-labeling laws. And then GM, in one of the worst decisions in the history of brand management, attempted a legal defense: they announced that there was really no difference between the engines of the various divisions, and if any consumers had been gullible enough to believe the advertising, they had only themselves to blame. By about 1980, the marketplace had accepted that the GM brands differed only in the trim and the shape of the logo (apart from Cadillac and the Corvette).
I really think part of GM's problem now is: their brands mean nothing. "Brand" means "consumer's expectations", and what do you expect from a GM brand these days? Segmenting the market with no brand identity is like slicing a pizza with the edge of a sponge. They could have been in much better shape.
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