In Europe, Rallye racing and motorsports is a major deal where entire cities are closed for a race course. How many "Gran Prix's" do we have here? Logically, in Germany in particular, the cars are defined by "designations" that tell you about the car's engine size and specifications. 300 SEL = 3.0 Liter luxury sedan with fuel injection and long wheel base. The French and Italians will get creative with names like "Modena", "Testarossa", "Dauphin", "Caravelle" and so forth.

Until recently, in America, selling a car was a matter of a romantic "Image" rather than "designations". Even while using Eurostyle desigations in terms like "GTO", "Torino", "Grand Torino", "Z-28", and "442", we still relied on marketing imagry to sell cars made in this country.

Names like "Corvette", "Mustang", "Javelin", "Marlin", "Barracuda", "Bel Aire", "Impala", "Fairlane", "Galaxy", "Newport", "Fury", "Polara", "Duster", "Charger", "Challenger", "Belvedere", "Hawk", and so forth, try to effectively make us envision the "style" of that particular car. So the marketing boys were trying to sell those cars to a specifically targeted demographic that was passionate about their motoring experience, but not so sophisticated as to need alpha-numeric designations to make them feel that they were enthusiasts engaged in a "daily driver" road competition.

Until recently that is. Now we've seen "Mustang 5.0", "S-10" "XR4Ti, "STS" and other alpha numerics that are designed to make us feel more "global" in our consumerism, and boost that sense of international sophistication we need so we don't feel inferior to people who buy BMW's, Mercedes. SAAB's and Voilvos. There are even designations for trucks and minivans like "Grand Voyager LXI" or "GLE", "Aerostar XT", "Sierra Z-71", Suburban "SL", "SLT", or "ST". Enter the Japanese with their own blend, and you find Lexus, Acura, and Infinity selling alpha-numerics that are specifically designed to mimic the Mercedes and other European namelates with absolutely no apologies. Now, even Saturn ahs introduced an "s" class...

Marketing is an artform that has to incorporate a wide variety of diciplines to sell product. Chief among those are psychology, visual aestetics, theatrics, fantasy, and the ability to appeal to our most basic instincts for ego gratification, security, and creature comfort (see psycology). It is a wide reaching dicipline that must constantly be changing in order to keep up with the variances in the value systems that consumers use to purtchase product. Believe it or not, once names like "Pinto", "Maverick", "Gremlin", "Pacer", and "Dart" actually sold a lot of cars.

Welcome to the global economy.

__________________

Scott Longston
Northern California Wine Country...
"Turbos whistle, grapes wine..."