Word: cadillacs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Chevrolet Malibu, the country's favorite family car and one of its all-time best sellers, totaling more than 6.5 million cars in a 20-year run. A year later, Ford claimed that turf with the Taurus. In the next 10 years, Chevrolet and Pontiac sales slid 37%, Cadillac's 42%, Buick's 49%. Oldsmobile's crashed 71%. The company lost a total of $30 billion from 1990 through 1992, a cash drain that amounted to nearly $50 million for every working day every year for three years, before the GM board finally staged the 1992 coup that installed...
...elegantly tailored four-door sedan that, its chief designer says, "looks like a car dressed in a Chanel suit." From Pontiac, there is a two-tone macho minivan for suburbanites who still lust for the fast lane. From Saturn, the EV1, a noiseless, all-aluminum electric vehicle. From Cadillac, Catera, GM's first Euro-American entry, designed to take on such young luxury imports as the BMW-3s and Lexus ES300...
...convert it into more volume units. Oldsmobile needs to reposition itself to sophisticated, refined midsize-car buyers who will be new purchasers to GM. Buick's great focus will remain on premium American road cars, but it needs to recapture that traditional element from a younger customer base. Cadillac really needs to make its breakthrough as a global player. Saturn's image is just perfect. All they need to do is execute product growth." Whew! Interpretation: GM needs to sell a ton of cars...
Witness, for example, the fate of a recent advertising creation, a wacky, Day-Glo pink duck, an escapee from the Cadillac crest, that has been playing a lead cartoon role in ads for the '97 Catera. The "Caddy that zigs" is aimed at younger, entry-level luxury buyers in their 30s and 40s, almost a generation behind most traditional Cadillac owners. The duck may entertain such prospects, but it also infuriated many Cadillac loyalists and even some of GM's top brass. In the past, the duck and the campaign (as well as whoever was in charge) might have ended...
...time to bring them back into the fold. We need to launch these products, put them out there and let the customer decide. This is put-up or shut-up time." Fighting words, Mr. Middlebrook. But as Alfred Sloan might also urge on his new generation at Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac and Chevy: There is still much to do, and little time left...