GM did not get in this mess overnight. This is about 20-plus years of bad management, poor marketing, poor decisions and GM being insulated and isolated. It is also due to GM feeling that since they were big and powerful, they could dictate to the public what we should buy. This is not so, as they have found out.

With that out of the way, I could name many things that went wrong. But instead, I will present the GM that I think would work in today’s market. In the 1960’s when GM was successful, brands were semi-independent and they had fewer models. GM made more with less.

Today, GM must globalize. There must be platform sharing across the world.

Chevrolet will not get every car and every platform. Let me make that clear up front. It does not matter what they are doing at GM Middle East, or at Holden.

• Buick will do a complete 360 in image. It will be a risky gamble.
• Oldsmobile will return.
• Pontiac will live with fewer models.
• This new GM will cover every segment of the market and this GM will reach different types of buyers with fewer models.

This GM will have:

• A beginning entry level mainstream” American” brand: Chevrolet
• A performance brand with an emphasis on affordable performance: Pontiac
• An “American” styled brand with an emphasis on technology and “American” styled luxury” Oldsmobile
• A entry to mid-level import fighter luxury brand: Buick
• A full on ultra luxury brand: Cadillac
• A luxury/ commercial truck brand: GMC

The dealerships will be interchangeable. There will be no stand alone Oldsmobile, Buick, Pontiac or GMC dealers. They will be housed at a Chevrolet dealer or next to a Cadillac showroom or together. No dealerships will be added. The metro areas will have fewer dealerships. Some will be consolidated. The rural dealerships will have the brands housed in the same dealer. This automatically cuts down on the number of dealers.
The platforms will be:

• Epsilon (fwd)
• Alpha/Zeta (rwd)
• trucks
• Lambda (fwd and awd)
• Theta
• Delta

Each platform can be lengthened, stretched, shortened or modified to ride according to market segment tastes. Each division will be marketed as they were in the past as a company owned by GM until the GM name can be rebuilt from its tarnished image. The Saturn approach will be used here. The dealership agreements will not be set up like Saturn. In order to get or maintain a GM franchise, certain criteria must be met.

A division roundup

Chevrolet: Mainstream and affordable entry level cars. The sports cars lead into Pontiac. Some of Saturn’s models will end up at Chevrolet. The Chevrolet dealers and everyone involved will be re-educated to a higher standard. No more thinking we are bottom feeders and sell cheap cars. The dealerships must be given the same respect as a Buick dealer, with less on the inside. Models include:

• Malibu (fwd sedan)
• Impala (fwd) (large sedan) ( no bench seat)
• Cruze
• Equinox
• Volt
• Beat/Spark
• Aveo(total overall make over)
• Silverado
• Tahoe
• Suburban
• Zafira
• Corvette
• Camaro
• Traverse

Pontiac: No bench seats or cheap interiors. The beginning of the use of higher materials. Think of it as a cheap BMW, like Bob Lutz said. If you cannot afford a performance Cadillac, this is the way to go.

• Bonneville: rwd upper/premium midsized (will fill all the mission of all the old B and H bodies)
• Firebird/Trans Am: More features and options than Camaro, with different styling.
• Grand Prix: rwd midsized coupe. Think BMW 6 Series and the old Grand Prix from the 1960’s and 1970’s. A GTO trim level can be spun off Grand Prix.

Oldsmobile: This brand will be the only GM brand with bench seats and the use of the next level of higher grade materials and features. This division is GM’s test bed for new technologies. It will be the one with the “traditional” American things like digital gauges and bench seats and velour fabrics. They will soak up the Lincoln Town Car buyers and Grand Marquis buyers, as Ford is leaving the segment. They will also take Chrysler 300 and Toyota Avalon buyers as well. Toronado and 98 will share instrumentation panels like they did in the 1970’s. I will not make the assumption Buick and hard line traditional Cadillac buyers will flock to Oldsmobile.

• 98: rwd or fwd. Will fill the mission of all the old C Bodies (98, DeVille, Park Avenue) with a contemporary twist. GM’s only traditional full-sized luxury sedan.
• Toronado: full-sized personal luxury coupe. Exactly what it was in 1966 and 1992.
• Cutlass/Ciera: The front wheel drive coupe. The only GM convertible other than sports cars will be here.

Toronado and Cutlass will offer bucket seats as an option. If you make Cutlass rwd, it would be GM’s only midsized rear drive mainstream sedan. If you make it fwd or rwd, it would be GM’s only midsized coupe. A Custom Cruiser wagon is a possibility as well, derived from GM’s Holden unit in Australia.

Buick: Entry to mid-level import fighter. Returning to its roots as the upscale professional’s car. Buick China will influence, not dictate, the American Buick. No Buicks will have bench seats, be over a 197 inches, have less content, or come in multiple trim levels. They will come loaded with options that can be added. The tag line: Isn’t it time you consider Buick. Model lineup includes:

• Insignia/Regal: Lexus ES fighter/Acura TL
• LaCrosse: As big as a Buick will get at a 197 inches. Acura RL Infiniti G35 clientele
• Saturn VUE/Opel Antara: Becomes Buick Rendevous. Loaded. Lead in to Enclave
• Holden Calais: A loaded rwd Buick aimed at the Lexus GS and Infiniti M Class.
• Astra: Entry level Buick for the budget conscious luxury buyer.

Cadillac: Ultra Luxury Brand. No excuses, no cuts, all out standard of the world luxury

• FTS: Rolls Royce Bentley Fighter at a cheaper price
• DTS: BMW 7 Series and Mercedes S Class and Audi A8 fighter
• CTS: BMW 5 Series and Mercedes E Class fighter. The CTS will have variations including coupe, sedan, and wagon.
• STS/ETC: Two and four-door ultra-luxury cars. Low volume. Think the big coupe at Mercedes and the four passenger Chinese SLS.
• BTS: BMW 3 Series fighter
• SRX: Cadillacs crossover.
• Escalade: Range Rover and other upper crust SUV’s.
• Converj: The luxury Volt

GMC: Luxury truck brand and commercial trucks. They will have to be brought up to a notch below Buick in terms of luxury and way ahead Chevrolet. Can be sold any any dealer except Chevrolet.

The new GM will have fewer cars. Chevrolet leads into Oldsmobile. Pontiac leads into Cadillac and both mean performance. Buick is aimed directly at the heart of the luxury car market and connects with GMC. You now have every segment covered by a fewer cars. Brand images include:

• Oldsmobile and Chevrolet will play up the “American” brand angle.
• Pontiac will play up the ” stylish affordable” performance.
• The Buick emblem will float with a black background. It will compare itself to the imports and leave many asking: “Was that a Buick?”
• Cadillac will go back to Cadillac Style that it used before, but emphasis will be on the new definition of luxury.

GM will look like a supermarket aisle, where you see Kellogg’s cereal brands. You know each Kellogg’s cereal caters to a certain segment, all variations on that brand. You know General Mills also has different cereal brands, too. They compete against Kellogg’s. The brands inside the company complement each other.

A brief bit of the item is posted here; go to their site to read the whole thing as it,  and the comments, are an important read.

Earle said that he’d seen a lot of articles and remarks about discontinuing Buick and selling off Saab. The challenge for GM shouldn’t be having an “attic sale,” but rather how to manage the company’s intellectual property, specifically its brand names and trademarks. He thinks the current crisis is “an innovative development opportunity” and that GM’s brands “could be great platforms for learning labs for new concepts.”

Instead of thinking about which brands to keep, which to sell and which to kill, GM should be thinking about what opportunities there are to repurpose those brands down the road. GM needs to identify which are its core brands and which are non-core brands and then use the non-core brands as “springboards to new ideas.”

GM still has a treasure trove of IP in terms of brand marks, designs and technology. GM can leverage that IP with partnerships inside and outside the auto industry.”

We should also add that the GM legacy doesn’t just mean its main auto brands, including Buick and Olds, but its former auto plate names, like the above mentioned Skylark.

We took this similar position with Macy’s, which has not utilized, indeed wasted, its former store brands.

Saturn Rings Up Zero

As an owner of two Saturn wagons, I liked them both, and especially the original 1994 Saturn SW series wagon. The SW1 (I think that was the exact model) was sensible, good looking and just right, and it is amazing that Saturn dealers have coasted so long on the legacy of this first product series. In coming decades, case study after case study will be written on the failure of Saturn by General Motors after such a strong start, and loyal customers.

First, what was great about Saturn as it was originally? The cars were inexpensive, but not the cheapest. Things like changing a tire and the like were TOTALLY simplified to make it easy. Owner’s manuals were in concise English. Their dealer sales tactics were beyond reproach, or at least at my dealer, Haywood-Clarke in Richmond. It truly was a new method of building and selling cars, and the idea that a car came from a wooden floor in Spring Hill, Tennessee was a revolution. The idea that you didn’t have to dicker with some oily salesman for the price was inspiration.

Our second Saturn was a wagon, from the LW series. It was actually an Opel, according to a good friend who worked at GM. It was solid, though a bit odd looking as the front looked a bit too squeezed. It was sort of un-handsome rather than ugly, but definitely sensible. And comfortable, even in a 12-hour trip on I-95.

I grew up with a green Opel Kadett, sold at Perry Buick (or was it Brud Buick) in Norfolk, Virginia. It was a great car, very spiffy, and it frustrated me to no end that Buick did not stick with the idea of offering Opel cars at its Buick dealers. When I learned that my Saturn was more an Opel, I wondered about our Saturn and why GM doesn’t just sell the Saturn as an Opel?

To me, Saturns had to be made in Tennessee and Opels had to be made in Germany; the geography of a brand’s manufacture is critical to its meaning in the eyes of customers. Bob Lutz lost total credibility when he remarked that Saabs didn’t need to be made in Germany. (See related story in Branding Blog of Dave Young.)

Options To Sell Saturn

In fact, if GM has to keep Saturn for the next few years, GM might well offer dealers an Opel sign to hang in the window of the showroom, and re-badge a few Saturns as Opels and allow dealers to sell GM’s European cars there. There are about five million European-born Americans, and those are the market for Opel. Heck, GM has little to lose; why not sell a Vauxhall here as there is a large Brit expat community here? Or there is another option for General Motors to sell its European operations and Saturn; while it would totally decimate GM’s car sales, it is a far more sale-able package than just Saturn by itself.

Saturn dealer Carl Galeana of Michigan was quoted in the Feb. 19 Wall Street Journal saying that he still had hope for Saturn. It would be a fantastic entry point for one of the Chinese car manufacturers. Indeed if GM threw in the rights to the Oldsmobile brand along with it, it might actually make the Saturn dealer system more viable. (Read our story on the future of Oldsmobile.)

Pontiac, a GM Sub-brand

What has happened to Pontiac is pitiful, above the fact of many of the cars are plastic crap. Separate from this, Pontiac has not been broad enough with its marketing. It is one thing to ask people to buy cars with racing heritage. That is good. But what GM has done with Pontiac is to turn the whole brand into a souped up set of redneck racers, and that doesn’t work for the mass market. First, racing folk don’t take Pontiac seriously, and the “Excitement” theme doesn’t inspire the oldsters who buy Pontiac. It’s fine to offer a race-styled car model, but that sort of approach should not go for the entire brand.

Actually, GM could have gotten away with this racing approach if the cars were reliable, but since they were ugly junk, it made it worse.

That being said, GM has a problem, and the past is past. What to do now?

They need to keep offering the Pontiac, even as a sub-brand sold alongside other GM brands (we have some opinions on Buick’s screw-ups here). That should have been the avenue for Oldsmobile; if the brand is not selling, then ratchet down the marketing and turn it into a smaller brand, where you can revamp it on the platform of a few really good models.

So-called analysts have said that GM needs to kill Pontiac to go back to profit; we disagree. We are encouraged that Pontiac marketing will be scaled back, and the brand will only be a few select models.

Tomorrow: What to do about Saab

We like to think we had something to do with it, but there were larger forces at play, including those executive jets that flew to Congress when GM asked for a bailout. Has it really come to this? Yes it has; read Robert Farago’s hilarious post on eliminating trashcans at Warren Tech on the website TheTruthAboutCars.

Models are the real “Celebs” at Buick

You are reading something here that you aren’t reading ANYWHERE else. Let us tell you what the real “stars” are at Buick. The “Star” is the Buick brand itself. And not the Buick brand alone, but the ensemble of Park Avenue, LeSabre, Century and Skylark. These auto nameplates are the real stars at Buick. Here, a logo of a restored Skylark. People don’t care about Tiger. They care about the cars. They love the cars. And when Buick doesn’t give them the cars, people don’t buy them.

We gave a number of reasons to end the sponsorship, but we didn’t actually do the math on it earlier this month. As we see it, the yearly cost of Woods as a spokesman added $35 to the price of each car (we got this by dividing $7 million and Buick volume, which is now a paltry 200,000 units a year). Did Woods actually add that much value? Of course not. But here’s telling figure. If you are selling 800,000 cars a year, the cost per car goes way down, and Tiger might actually be a help. But the problem was, every year that Tiger was spokesman, sales volume went down. Of course that is true with CEO Fact Rick Wagoner, who has increased his power and salary at GM even as he as ruined one of America’s greatest companies.

A digression here: We are not blaming Tiger for the sales slide at GM. He was just doing what they asked, and who could blame him? But we do think he is symptomatic of the larger problem of this CEO-as-royalty culture. Because Tiger could have recast the image of Buick without this big deal contract, with a one-off promotion. The real reason GM kept Tiger on was that execs and Buick dealers liked hanging around with him. Well, we’d like to hang around with him too, but we learned in primary school that the worst thing you could accuse a rich kid of is buying his friends.

Legacy costs a straw man

GM now is on a legacy costs complaint binge. It has unfairly said that it is burdened with over $2,000 in legacy costs for each auto it sells, with extra pension costs, health care costs and the like. But this is so blame the union, and it is wrong. Why? Because if GM’s bloated fatcats were producing cars that people liked, it might actually have some sales volume, and those costs would be fewer. If you double the sales volume, those costs go way down. The reality is that GM has enormous advantages from being a legacy brand, like a strong dealer network and beloved brands like Buick.

This is the same issue as the elimination of Oldsmobile and the over-investment in crap like Hummer and Saturn. GM is about sales volume, and badge engineering a few platforms into a whole lineup of different looking cars. That is why the discussion now of selling Buick, or eliminating Pontiac, eliminating GMC or any number of other discussions misses the point. The point is that GM needs lots of volume to keep the machine going. It needs all the nameplates. And if you take away any more volume from GM, even the paltry number of Pontiacs sold each year, you make GM less viable.

Like the Tiger Woods sponsorship, the the discussion over the keeping of General Motors’s legacy brands involves so much crazy talk. Buick will obviously survive the mess at General Motors, as the brand is still selling in China. But there is no earthly reason any of the legacy brands of General Motors should disappear. Even still, writers from Conde Nast’s Portfolio and even Barron’s have suggested that GM’s nameplates should disappear. This is proof that the discussion of General Motors is WAY off the mark.

What should disappear is not Pontiac or Buick or GMC. What should disappear is the bloated executive salaries and the featherbedding. Until that disappears, GM will have no hope.

More Prescient Insight from BrandlandUSA

Read our other post on GM’s wacky leadership at Nameplates Like Hummer, and Saab. And read our discussion of the Future of the Oldsmobile Brand for some thoughts on why keeping these legacy brands is the only hope that GM has. We detailed that idea in July, in our prescient post GM Stock Drop Mirrors Olds Elimination.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that General Motors has a large number of slow selling cars, including the Pontiac G5, Pontiac G8, Saab 9-7, Saab 9-5 and Saturn Astra. Apparently, they are pretty good cars, and get decent mileage. But GM can’t sell them.

But the Chevrolet Silverado and the Chevrolet Impala are doing well. Hmmm. Let’s see. One group has a bunch of unknown nameplaces, namely G5, G8 and Astra. And the other has names that are well known to consumers. Names like Impala and Malibu. Get it?

Duh. Consumers get it. For decades, GM sold a limited number of nameplates, and rarely switched around model names, and only dropped a model name when there was an extremely negative connotation (i.e. Chevette). The Olds Cutlass, Chevrolet Caprice and Buick Century were staples. And then GM started switching around all its models. It would be as if NBC switched around its programming all the time. Consumers wouldn’t know what to do. So they go with the familiar. Or go elsewhere.

That’s not to say it can’t be done. GM has done it with Cadillac, where it rebranded the company by eliminating Sedan DeVille, Eldorado and Fleetwood. But that is expensive, time consuming, requires incredible skill and sometimes doesn’t work. It helped to kill off Oldsmobile. Who wants to drive an Alero when you want an Eighty Eight?

So you can’t do it all the time.

This dropping of nameplates is ostensibly done to attract younger car buyers. A noble goal, but not a goal for the desperate car company. Furthermore, many of the folks who buy these future clunkers from General Motors are older. And more familiar with familiar names.

So they go into a showroom, expecting a LeMans. And they get a Pontiac Vibe. Now, a Pontiac Vibe is a great car, and I think is actually a Toyota Matrix. But it doesn’t sell like one. How about calling it something folks already know. Like a Pontiac LeMans.

News flash to GM. People live til they are 80 these days, and so you need to market to people over 50. People over 50 don’t want to drive a Vibe. But they do have disposable income, and might even want a Trans Am or Bonneville.

What are the top missing General Motors nameplates that might be known to an over 50 crowd? They are the cars sold during the late 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Bub, some of these nameplates had 30 years on them, minimum. Below are the most obvious.

Pontiac

• Pontiac Bonneville
• Pontiac Trans Am
• Pontiac LeMans

Oldsmobile

• Oldsmobile Ninety Eight
• Oldsmobile Cutlass
• Oldsmobile Eighty Eight

Buick

• Buick LeSabre
• Buick Park Avenue
• Buick Century