Category: Marketing / Advertising

Proper Fake

Drive Time, Marketing / Advertising

Last week I slammed the idiots who are seduced by marketing into paying exorbitant sums of money for ordinary products like vodka (Grey Goose) and guns (Heckler Und Koch).

Then yesterday I bitched about modern cars and their electronic gizmos that cost too much (in every sense of the word) and which at some point are going to be taken away from you;  and added that I’d really prefer to drive an older car without all that nonsense.

I thought that it might be kinda fun to combine those two concepts into a single buying experience.  Here’s how I figured it out.

First, we have a car company whose products command premium prices (i.e. you pay through the nose) for their old cars, but whose cars of that era were frankly just not very good, performance-wise.

Step forward the 1950s-era Porsche 356, and here’s a good example thereof:

Now let’s be honest, here.  The old 356 may have been very reliable (compared to its competitors) for that time, but if you’ve ever driven an original, you would have been horribly disappointed (as I most certainly was).  The engine is seriously underpowered, it doesn’t handle or brake that well on those skinny tires and drum brakes, although it does give tremendous driving fun because you always feel connected to the road.  But it’s the engine sound which really disappoints.  It sounds pretty much like a VW Beetle engine of the same vintage:  a kind of whiny clatter.  My take:  the original 356 isn’t worth as much as they’re being charged for.  Frankly, the premium prices are a function of restoration “to original” state.  Once you get past the Concours Set, the prices become more “reasonable” because restorers install modern switchgear, better wiring materials and nicer exhaust systems, for instance:

My thing about the 356 is that I just like its looks.  It’s quirky, a little ugly (“a lot ugly” — New Wife) but above all it has character.  Nothing else is quite like it.

But if you strip away all the Porsche stuff and just go with what it looks like, you get one of these:

Looks like a 356 museum, dunnit?  But all those 356s are replicas (gasp!):  fiberglass bodies attached to a shortened ’71 VW Beetle chassis, powered by a 2.3-liter VW engine, which pushes out 125 hp (compared to the original 356’s 90-odd hp).  Plenty power for that little body, and they come with a proper exhaust system which makes them sound more modern Porsche than old Beetle.  Modern tires, too.

Price?  Between $60,000 and $72,000.

Still too much?  I don’t think so, because this isn’t one of those DIY garage fiberglass kit cars.  If you order one from this particular manufacturer, you could wait up to two years for your order to get fulfilled.  Me, I’d just get one of the existing stock ones, as in the pic.

But hey, not everyone likes the 356.  However, everybody loves the Ferrari 250 Spyder, right?

Whoa.

Trouble is that these puppies sell for well over a million — or more — and now you’re in a lot more silliness than a $30 bottle of vodka.

Except that the model above sells for $105,000.  How so?  Well, it’s not a “pure Ferrari”.  Like the Vintage Motors replica of the Porsche 356 above, this is a fiberglass bodied Ferrari lookalike with a… 6.9-liter Ford V8 under the hood.  (Take that, Ferrari!)

Okay:  is this going to handle anything like a Ferrari (any Ferrari)?  Most definitely not.  Does it matter?  No.

Because you’re not going to track this car (unless you’re an idiot), you’re going to drive around in a little beauty, at 10% of the cost of the original, with an AC Cobra-like thunder coming out of the exhaust.

It’s all very well being a badge “purist”.  The problem is that the owners of the badges have made their products so expensive that the cars are all being bought by essentially the same 100 people, leaving the rest of us plebs out of the picture.

The thing is that to those 100 guys, the “proper” badges are either purchased for bragging rights (i.e. dick comps) or as investments, no different from a condo in Monaco or a 25-carat diamond (don’t get me started on De Beers or we’ll be here all day).

Just in passing, I wonder how many miles Bill Gates has put on his Porsche 959?  (And if that story doesn’t make you grit your teeth in frustrated fury — for so many reasons — we can’t be friends.)

But there are guys who love the cars not for their “collector value” or any of that bollocks, but for their exquisite beauty and perhaps to a lesser degree, for their performance.  Guys like me.

And I have to tell you that if I won the lottery and some guy had put together a proper fiberglass Dino 246 shell on, say, a Porsche Boxster-type frame and engine…


…hold me back.

So I guess my question for y’all would be:  what quality (but inexpensive) replica would float your boat if you saw one?

Fooling The Gullible

Marketing / Advertising

As a longtime marketing guy, I’m still fascinated by how easy it is to hoodwink people by making them think that a higher price equates to better quality.

The genius move, however, is to build on another perception of quality, e.g. “German engineering” or “French luxury” as a support for that higher price.

The “German engineering” ethos has been leveraged countless times, most notably with Mercedes cars — although in this case, it was a reputation very well earned, back in the 1960s and -70s. (In the recent past:  not so much, as anyone who’s driven a Merc of said vintage will tell you.)  As gunnies, we all know of the Heckler & Koch example, which has enabled this bunch of WWII-era retreads to make oodles of cash out of their not-especially noteworthy handguns and cheekbone-crushing G3/PTR-91 automatic rifles.

It’s why I always roll my eyes at the extreme HK fanbois, because I’m positive that most of their fanaticism stems from a need to justify their paying a premium price for what is really a pretty ordinary product.

As for “French luxury”, here’s one example of the trope:  Grey Goose vodka, which is a case history for the ages.  (Watch it;  it’s 10 minutes of your time well spent.)

I happen to know quite a bit about vodka manufacturing, as it happens, having worked with the South African retail arm of Gilbey’s.  As I’ve recounted on these pages before, part of my education occurred when the Gilbey’s guys took me on a tour of their production facility, where an engineer taught me how to make cheap liquor:  take a clear distilled spirit (from any source:  potatoes, sugar cane, barley, wheat, apples, all mixed together, whatever) and pass it through a series of charcoal filters to make vodka, or add a few drops of diesel fuel(!) to make gin, and so on.

The genius of marketing, in the Grey Goose example, was not the manufacture of the vodka or the quality of its raw material, therefore — French wheat is no different from any other wheat — but utilizing the aura of French luxury brands (Louis Vuitton, Chanel etc.) to imply that GG was an exceptional product, made all the more so by creating an artificial bottleneck on supply, and most telling of all, selling the product at a premium price to the International Status-Hungry Parvenu Set.  Good grief:  $30 per bottle for vodka?  When it first came out, I tried it at a hotel bar somewhere — I think it was at Claridges in London, while on a business trip — and while I’m no expert on vodka, I have drunk a woeful amount of the foul stuff.  I could discern little difference between Grey Goose, Stolichnaya and Smirnoff.  (The bartender obliged me by setting up a blind taste test of the three brands — the mark of a good bartender, by the way.)  I identified Smirnoff immediately (see above for reasons), but GG and Stoli?  No chance.  And Stolichnaya, by the way, is a product that trades on the Russian ethos for vodka quality, go figure.

But what all the above illustrates is how easy it can be to dupe people into buying expensive products as part of an aspirational desire to be part of a specific set — most notably, what used to be described as the “jet set” (now, the private jet set), which contains elements of society such as professional footballers, pop stars, supermodels, Russian oligarchs, Hollywood actors, software billionaires and other such scum.

And never has the old adage been so verified that a fool and his money are soon parted.

New Mouthpiece

Drive Time, Marketing / Advertising

I see that following the resounding flop of the ad campaign for their new line, Jaguar is now looking for a new advertising agency.

It comes after the company announced plans to shift to electric vehicles with a bizarre new advertisement featuring brightly dressed models but no cars.

The group also abandoned its iconic ‘growler’ cat badge, replacing it with a curved geometric J and L symbol.

Defending the campaign late last year, JLR’s Managing Director Rawdon Glover told the Financial Times: ‘If we play in the same way that everybody else does, we’ll just get drowned out.’

Well, maybe so.  But in every good ad campaign — especially so for cars — the product has to come front and center, especially when it comes to their features.

Back to Jaguar:  while everyone’s laughing their asses off about this latest development — me included — allow me to remind you all about the Great Advertising Truism:

“Behind every shitty ad and stupid ad campaign lies a client’s signature.”

Which means that not only the ad agency should be fired, but also the client executive (CEO Rawdon Glover) whose signature okayed the campaign.

My suggestion to the new guys:  ditch the stupid new gay logo and go back to the old snarling jaguar.

And for the clients (headed by a new CEO): go back to making cars that people might actually want to drive — you know, that “heritage” thing.  Hire someone like Gordon Murray or Pininfarina to design it, if you can’t find a decent designer already working at JLR.

I suspect, however, that they’ll be doing neither;  in which case, let’s everyone wave bye-bye to Jaguar.

Back-Door Marketing

Marketing / Advertising, Travels

No, it has nothing to do with ass.  Sorry.  Before “back door” (like “adult”) became a porn industry expression, back-door marketing was a kind of marketing whereby you appealed to a consumer via unfamiliar (or apparently so) means — you know, get a free trip to Florida, free as long as you agree to listen to a 60-minute sales pitch for a time-share purchase.  That’s about the best example I can give.

Here’s another:  in my Inbox yesterday came this offer from American Airlines:

Note that the ticket may not be on American, but on their “partner” airline Qantarse, on which I have vowed never to fly, ever.  (Details here and here, for Those Of Short Memory.)

In my case of course, not only have I blanked Qantarse but also the entire continent of Strylia because fukkem, the foul bureaucratic pricks.  Even the presence of Beloved Grandchildren are insufficient incentives to get me to that poxy country, which should tell you everything.

And the next time I fly American — which is going to be a looooong time in the future — I’ll use up my paltry not-so-frequent flier miles instead of dollars because fukkem too.

If I Were A Paranoid Man

Marketing / Advertising

We’re all familiar with the situation:  you post something about a government conspiracy and the very next day you get a pop-up ad when you open a web page somewhere:

As I said in the title, if I were a paranoid man…

Not long ago I was running an errand which took me down the horrible I-35 south of Dallas.  It’s horrible not because of the road per se, but because to get to the I-35 south of Dallas from where I am, I have to somehow get around the Dallas downtown area, which as any local yokel will tell you, can be a terrifying experience.  (What tourists or newcomers feel when facing this situation I cannot even begin to fathom.)

Anyway, as any local yokel will tell you, South Dallas is a place to be avoided at all costs (think:  East L.A., South Side Chicago, Boston’s Combat Zone etc.).  Yet there I was, trundling along…

…and got a puncture which tore my right-hand rear tire to shreds.

Fortunately, it happened about 50 yards before an off-ramp, so I managed to get off the interstate and pull into a service station parking lot, there to await the arrival of roadside service.

Tangent:  I know how to change a tire, I’ve done it dozens of times before, but I’m decades older than I was the last time I did it, and as my insurance company provides the service for free… why the hell not?

However, I soon noticed that my environs were not the most salubrious, in that when I went into the little convenience store to get a Coke, the cashier was encased behind what looked like 12″-thick armored glass and stout steel bars.  The message was obvious, so I decided to forego the Coke and get back to my car ASAP.

I didn’t get back inside the car because that way I wouldn’t be able to get a 360° view of my surroundings, and more importantly, by standing next to the car I would have easy access to both my trusty 1911 and its backup, should that be necessary.

I waited for about an hour for the roadside service guy, and was only accosted by one scrote who needed a $5 gift “for gas to get to work”, a likely story as he looked like the last time he worked was during the elder Bush presidency.  Besides, I wasn’t going to get my wallet out only to be confronted by a knife.

Because if that happened, I’d have to shoot the asshole and then would come the cops, the call to my SCCA attorney, endless paperwork, confiscation of my 1911, forget about keeping my appointment… you get the picture:  all that hassle just because I might ventilate someone totally deserving of ventilation.

So I just pointed at my tire-less rim, and snarled that I had my own fucking problems and to leave me the fuck alone.

Which he did, fairly quickly and without any fuss.  Clearly, I didn’t look like a potential victim, for some reason.

Anyway, roadside service arrived and put on my “spare” (just a donut, 2,000-word rant omitted ).  Except that the donut was flat, despite the assurance from my last oil-change provider whom I’d asked to check on the thing (another 2,000-word rant omitted, but he just lost my business).  Fortunately, road service guy had one of those little quick-pump thingies which took care of the problem right there, so off I went, late for my appointment, but buoyed by the certain knowledge that afterwards, I’d have to stop by Discount Tires to get a replacement, oh joy, because there was no way the donut would get me the fifty-odd miles home, on said Dallas-area freeways where you get run off the road for daring to drive at only 70mph.

Anyway, I told you all that so I could tell you this.

Two days ago, I got an email which featured one of these:

It was the first such ad I’ve ever got in this manner, and if I were a paranoid man…

So the question is — because the coincidence seems a little too strong, even for me — how did these hucksters get my email addy?  From the insurance company, or the tire outlet?

Your guesses in Comments.

Afterword #1:  I actually already have one of the above in the trunk of the car, but I couldn’t remember when last I charged it up, which is why I relied on the roadside service guy to handle the problem.  I did recharge it when I got home.

Afterword #2:   I ended up getting four new tires, because apparently the 50,000-mile warranty didn’t cover tires that had passed the 100,000-mile mark some time back.  As the tire guy put it:  “You’re damn lucky you haven’t had at least two blowouts by now.” 
And the only way I was able to afford those four new tires was because of my Readers’ generosity during this, my Last Appeal (which still has a day or so to run, hint, hint ).