Italy v Argentina

[Pottree@domain.elided]

In a message dated 01/03/2002 4:41:56 AM Pacific Standard Time, 
owner-alfa-digest@domain.elided writes:


> I've said it before.  Without having lived in Italy (visited 3 times only),
> I think I know these guys at least to some extent, because we argentinians
> think and act the same:  

Indeed, the contenders from the New World seem to be giving the Italians a 
real run for their money lately; seems Argentina has been turning over its 
presidents at a rate of every 3 or 4 days recently.  That has got even the 
Italians beat, which is pretty amazing!  Perhaps this can be traced to the 
fact that so many people in Argentina are descended from Italians?  Hope they 
work out their financial/political problems soon!

Meanwhile, the talk of aspiration and image re: new car sales is something 
I'm sure they're taking very seriously at both FIAT and GM.  Let's face it, 
we here are the oddballs of the automotive world, and it's somewhere between 
very difficult and impossible to make a success out of a heavy industry 
process that caters mainly to oddballs.  If you MAKE cars, you want to make 
something like a Camry, that is, something that is a huge volume success with 
a combination of price, cost, quality, inoffensiveness, and powerful 
marketing.  The natural inclination of a business board would be to push a 
brand like ALFA to become more like Toyota, because that would maximize their 
ROI and makes sense from a manufacturing POV.  Fighting against this tide is 
a whole army of factors that ultimately, I think, will mean another course 
will have to be charted: there doesn't seem to be much likelihood that an 
ALFA can become "just like a Porsche or BMW or MB, the thing you actually 
want, only affordable (cheaper)" -- because they don't have a magic 
manufacturing angle to play. The idea of an Italian brand these days making a 
go of it with a price-sell strategy doesn't make any sense.  Surely ALFA 
could be making appealing, world-class products that would rival or surpass 
what the Germans are doing (or persuading everyone they are doing, which is 
the same thing as actually achieving it from a marking POV), but they 
couldn't do it dirt cheap.  

To me this whole issue is much more about strategy and marketing than it is 
about engineering and manufacturing: not how to do it but what to do.  

Here in the USA I think there are very very few car buyers left who would buy 
an American made car as a prestige vehicle, and those still around are mostly 
people who grew up prior to WW II and have very few purchases left in them.  
For the younger buyers, American cars are mostly tres declassee and the more 
upscale Japanese lines move on price (no matter how good they are or are not; 
if you offered most Lexus or Infinity buyers a MB for about the same or less 
$ they would drop the Japanese in an instant because what they really WANT is 
the prestige of the Germans).  And of course, though it may change in the 
future, automobiles are still a shrinking segment of the new vehicle market 
here, unlike Italy where operating cost is more of an issue.

As I see it today, the main value to GM of the ALFA brand is that it could be 
promoted as sophisticated, sexy, European, and not a dowdy American product 
that is more like a toaster than an aspirational lifestyle signifier for 
those educated and affluent enough to buy or lease new vehicles... and 
psychologically attuned in such a way that they prefer a car to a truck.  
IOW, ALFAs need to be sold, in the USA, to people who want to buy a car and 
are able to do so, which is a shrinking, lower-margin, and hotly contested 
segment.

Charlie
LA, CA, USA

--
to be removed from alfa, see /bin/digest-subs.cgi
or email "unsubscribe alfa" to majordomo@domain.elided