Last week, which would have been the early part of June 2010, there was an announcement by two high-level vice presidents of the General Motors Corporation, that they were going to get rid of the “Chevy” trademark. As most Americans would do, I interpreted that to mean that General Motors was going to rid itself of the Chevy brand. In recent years, General Motors has dropped Pontiac and Oldsmobile, and a few years earlier they dropped the LaSalle brand, which was a smaller Cadillac. In the meantime, they have sold Saturn and Hummer. I was beside myself wondering what in the hell General Motors was up to in dropping the Chevrolet brand.
I was not the only one who was up in arms about this decision. It turns out the dealers of Chevrolet were aghast at what they perceived as General Motors dropping them. Can anyone in his American right mind believe that the country would be better off if the Chevrolet brand didn’t exist? Absolutely not!
As it turns out, 24 hours later, General Motors announced that all it was to do was trying to get their dealers and the public to use the name Chevrolet rather than Chevy. That is where the stupido, stupido heading of this essay comes into focus. For 75 years or more, General Motors has labored mightily to get its product, the bottom of the price ladder, to be called Chevy rather than Chevrolet. Those of you who have two gray hairs (of which I have none) will recall Dinah Shore singing “See the USA in your Chevrolet.” Chevy has been an integral part of American life for more than 75 years.
In 1937, as a 15-year-old, I had saved my money from Schroth’s filling station so I had somewhere more than $50. The lovely lady in Richmond Heights or Clayton, Missouri, announced at the filling station where I was working that she would be willing to sell her Chevrolet coupe for $50. I scraped together every resource I had and I paid her the $50. That bought me a 1931 Chevrolet coupe which I must say, as I look back on it, was a tremendous investment. In 1941, I sold that coupe to my friend Talis Leocopolis for $50, the same price I had paid for it. That little car gave me excellent service and never broke down. The girl I was romancing thought it was great stuff.
So much for history. Let us move forward to the magic year of 2010. Two vice presidents of senior rank in the General Motors Corporation announced that henceforth, the Chevy brand should be called the “Chevrolet” brand. The fact of the matter is that the public and myself heard only the first part of that announcement and assumed that General Motors was stupidly going to abandon the Chevy line of cars. It was done with good reason because in the last few years General Motors had dropped the Oldsmobile, the Pontiac, the Saturn, and the Hummer. Why anyone would want to drop the Chevy line is incomprehensible. Within 24 hours, a mistake was realized by General Motors and they said, “Forget the whole thing, please.”
The two vice presidents who had signed the letter about the Chevy brand must have been off on their own and immediately found themselves isolated. More logically, it could be that the two vice presidents were devoid of marketing experience and wanted to purify the Chevrolet brand by calling it Chevrolet rather than Chevy.
Those two vice presidents must have felt terribly alone when the uproar from the dealers and from the buying public reached the ears of the Chairman of General Motors, who is now Ed Whitacre, an import from the chairmanship of Southwestern Bell, which acquired AT&T. I am not sure that Whitacre has any recognition of the value of the Chevy brand to General Motors. He is an import from AT&T and as far as I know he has had nothing to do with the automobile industry.
Because AT&T puts a heavy reliance on engineers, mainly electrical engineers, I suspect that Whitacre rose in the Southwestern Bell Corporation oblivious to the forces of marketing. That is my supposition. But consider this fact. He let that announcement be made by his subordinates for which, as Mr. Obama would say, he ought to have his ass kicked.
Over the years after my 1931 Chevy, I have owned other Chevrolets which all gave pretty good service. As I became a little more affluent, I was able to buy Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles, and hard as it is to believe, I eventually wound up with a Cadillac. The Cadillac was absolutely the worst car I ever drove from General Motors or anybody else. It wasn’t worth a lick.
If I were running the General Motors Corporation at this moment, I would be inclined to call those two vice presidents in and give them walking papers. What they did was stupid beyond belief and for letting this happen, Chairman Ed Whitacre deserves to have his ass kicked as well. So let me assure all Americans that the Chevy brand will continue to be produced and that there is no opprobrium for calling that car a Chevy. I leave you now as I hum, in my mind, the words to “See the USA in Your Chevrolet,” which is of course the Chevy brand.
E. E. CARR
June 16, 2010
Essay 465
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Kevin’s commentary: I read an interesting discussion the other day about car branding. Specifically it had to do with the question: why do some brands, like Hondas for instance, make easy-to-remember model names like “Accord” or “Civic,” whereas more luxury brands tend to just use model numbers and letters? The consensus reached was that the luxury brands want to be known as a brand, and would rather all their cars just be united under that umbrella of, say, “Lexus,” where lower-end cars need to stick their model names into the minds of the general population. I’m not sure if it was right or not but it definitely was interesting.
Similarly I think that “Chevy” is the more low-end term, whereas a push towards calling everything a “Chevrolet” would just be a halfhearted attempt to do what, for instance, Audi is doing. Not a great idea, if you ask me.
Also, it’s crazy that a car used to be something you could buy for fifty bucks! Inflation is nuts.