Quote:
Originally Posted by 100_Percent_Juice
My original comment was to Kevin saying "it's stupid for them to think a marketing campaign will sell an inferior product." It has been working for years, its just now falling on its face because Americans have realized that there is a better alternative than what they have been fed. I agree with what you said. Even the best marketing cannot sustain the sale of a crappy car. The H2 is just a single example of many crappy cars that when first introduced sold like hotcakes because of marketing and now you don't see them anymore.
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The U.S. industry has been failing for 30 years and the down economy caught them. The industry probably would have limped along for another 10-20 before with the good bits being bought by foreign competitors as they slowly died without the recession.
GM used to have 50% U.S. market share. In the '70s, the big three had 80%+, now it is half that. They failed to recognize the change in consumer wishes and kept trying to market the same old thing, or worse, the new thing that is way off the mark.
This graph is pretty interesting. It really shows them just failing to compete. No amount of "baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Chevrolet" patriotism marketing can/could save them. They became uncompetitive both from a product and a cost perspective. You can't compete when you are paying the guy bolting seats into a car $70K+ including benefits...
People bitch about Wall St. wages, but most are proportional to the amount the employee brings to the bottom line. In the auto industry, the exceptional wages and benefits actually take away from the bottom line and profitability of the company... It will be very interesting now that the UAW owns a chunk of GM and Chrysler how they reconcile wages and the companies ongoing existence.