What Would George and Abe Say? Automakers Shelve ‘Made in America’
February 18, 2008

By Dale Buss

Maybe, more than six years after 9/11 and nearly five years after the start of the war in Iraq, consumers are tired of patriotic pitches.  Maybe the unmitigated globalization of auto production makes it just too hard. It might be that “green” marketing doesn’t leave room for the red, white and blue. Or perhaps the idea is just in a lull.

But whatever the reasons, the use of “Made in America” themes in car marketing seems to be at a generational low these days.

Of the major vehicle brands, only General Motors’ Saturn and Chevrolet divisions have been openly touting “American” themes lately, even though all of the biggest automakers now produce the majority of their U.S.-market vehicles in American factories. Toyota, for example, has been careful about invoking patriotism despite the fact that most of its vehicles for sale in North American now are built on this continent. Not even Chrysler — with newly repatriated ownership — is touting its rediscovered American roots in its marketing.

“I don’t know if it’s the relevant message that people are looking for now,” said Deborah Meyer, Chrysler’s vice president and chief marketing officer since last fall, after she left the same job at Lexus. “Customer decisions come down to what kind of value and innovation do you have, and how are you keeping that value safe?”

Toyota marketing executive Steve Sturm essentially agreed. “Consumers buy a product because they want that product and the benefits of it, such as quality, design and engineering,” said Toyota’s North American vice president of strategic planning and corporate communications. “And if it’s built in America, that’s just another part of the product proposition. It’s not the first or second premise but part of the overall proposition.”

Besides, so many other types of products long ago busted the traditional importance to consumers of domestic origins, ranging from Japanese-made consumer electronics to European fashions.

Barely six years after 9/11 had stoked renewed patriotism in every area of American life — notably including marketing — a survey last fall of large-company CMOs and other senior executives illustrated this reality. “Buy American” was one of the bottom 10 marketing concepts in importance to the members of the Marketing Executive Networking Group, along with other hoary themes such as Six Sigma. On top: “Customer satisfaction” and “customer retention.”

More Subtle than Mount Rushmore
Auto-industry appeals to domestic pride used to be frequent and blatant. In the late Seventies and early Eighties, Lee Iacocca openly pleaded with U.S. consumers and taxpayers to save Chrysler in part simply because it was an American carmaker. A big portion of Saturn’s initial appeal was that it was an import-beater, trying to return small-car manufacturing to our shores; the launching ad agency was Hal Riney, whose famous “Morning in America” ads helped get Ronald Reagan elected president. And especially in pursuit of pickup buyers, Ford and Chevrolet regularly relied on patriotic themes as recently as a few years ago.

Some old-fashioned Made in America marketing still goes on, of course. The purest example is Chevrolet’s continuing Our American Revolution campaign for its pickup trucks, which includes one ad that flashes images of unvarnished Americana ranging from Mount Rushmore to a fireworks display to a Friday-night high school football game — as seen over the tailgates of Chevy trucks through time. It proudly appeared on Super Bowl Sunday.

But even Saturn is demonstrating a more subtle approach, in resignation to today’s consumer sensibilities and the realities of modern automotive manufacturing. It also matters that Saturn’s brand skews young, and young Americans are much more likely than previous generations to picture themselves as global citizens.

Last year, for example, Saturn hatched a new ad campaign under the “Rethink American” theme. Its TV ads featured staple snapshots of the American experience including a hand with a wedding band, billowing smokestacks, and a triumphant Lance Armstrong.

Yet the appeal was subtle. The campaign attempted “to recast a cultural moment in America through the lens of the American car,” an executive with Saturn’s ad agency, Deutsch LA, told Adweek last summer. “Saturn can’t operate as an automotive company; it has to operate on the cultural level.”

But the campaign emphasized “rethink” more than “American,” with a focus on what the executive called the “revolutionary ideas” behind Saturn. One of those ideas, Saturn spokesman Kyle Johnson told AutoObserver, is that the brand has diversified the origins of its vehicles and is now a big recipient of GM’s globally integrated product-development and manufacturing network. The Saturn Vue SUV, for instance, is a European-designed Opel that is built in Mexico, and its new Astra sedan is arriving from Antwerp, Belgium.

“A lot of lines are getting blurred on a global basis when it comes to being a domestic versus an import company,” Johnson said. “But consumers still recognize Saturn very much as being an American brand.”

Take My Hyundai to the Levee?
Even Chevrolet, that all-American icon, is reflecting the new reality. More than 700 songs have been written that include “Chevrolet” or “Chevy” in the lyrics, said Chevrolet spokesman Terry Rhadigan. But the Chevy mindset also must account for the fact that it is GM’s fastest-growing brand globally; sales were up by about 50 percent last year in the Asia-Pacific region, for example. And increasingly, Chevrolet is devoting marketing resources and media spots to promoting the broad “green” nature of its product portfolio.

So the Americana ads become a form of exception, and largely focused on the pickup truck market, rather than remain the rule. “We’re a global company that happens to be headquartered in America,” Rhadigan said. Consumers think whether Chevy vehicles are actually made in America “is less important.”

A new gambit by Ford seems to confirm this sentiment. In January the company unveiled a concept SUV it called Explorer America at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. But Ford emphasized only the vehicle’s fuel-economy improvements, with no reference to why it bothered to call the concept “America.”

Chrysler’s stance also has underscored the anemic resonance of patriotic themes these days. As part of DaimlerChrysler, the U.S. unit had completely drowned out the streetfighting-American personality hatched by Iacocca, partly in favor of marketing its German technology.

So if ever there might have been a grand opportunity for a domestic automaker to return to love of country as an advertising theme, it occurred last summer, when Cerberus Capital Management — an American, though private, concern — bought a majority stake in Chrysler from the German company. Chrysler even enjoyed the benefit of almost all of its production being domestic.

But except for brief acknowledgements that Chrysler had returned to American hands, the company has done almost nothing to exploit this turn of events. “To emphasize that wouldn’t respond to solutions for consumer needs,” Meyer said. “We would rather spend our dollars telling people that we’re being innovative, and how we’ve solved their (product) needs. That’s a very powerful message. That’s what will really drive people into the showroom.”

Analysis by BrandIntel, a Toronto-based marketing-research agency, backs Meyer up. Made in America “is a lot less important to the consumer than it used to be,” said Alan Dean, BrandIntel’s vice president of innovation. “It’s gone from being something of a rallying cry 25 years ago to the average person to being increasingly pushed into a bit of a niche.”

National identities still mean something to American car buyers, BrandIntel has found. Notions including “German engineering” still resonate with them; and consumers are more likely to infer quality manufacturing from a Japanese make and credit American brands with design leadership.

Still Room for the Message
And other findings — plus automakers’ actual behavior — substantiate the fact that there is still room in the U.S. marketplace for an effective Made in America appeal. Nearly half (45 percent) of American consumers said they buy only U.S.–made vehicles or prefer to buy those vehicles, in a survey last summer by TNS Automotive, a Marlborough, Mass.–based consumer-research company. That compared with 44 percent of respondents who were neutral on the issue.

But only 17 percent of consumers in the TNS survey said they were influenced positively by whether a vehicle is union-made. That finding illustrates the clear fracture in the traditional tight relationship between domestic manufacturing and union workforces.

“Of the companies gaining market share, none of their plants are unionized,” noted Lincoln Merrihew, senior vice president of TNS. “But at the same time, a lot of big pickups are union-made, and that’s a large chunk of the market — and where a lot of the Big Three loyalists are.”

That factor is why Chevrolet aims its flag-waving themes mainly at pickup-truck buyers. And it explains why Toyota has tried to create a Made in America patina around the new, Texas-built Tundra it introduced more than a year ago in an attempt to compete more effectively with the Chevrolet Silverado, Ford F-150 and Dodge Ram.

In general, said Toyota spokeswoman Cindy Knight, the brand has performed “extensive research on the American heartland truck customer” and has boasted “this truck can do what you need to do in your business.”

Also, in a new corporate advertising spot last fall, Toyota featured the non-union Tundra plant in San Antonio as well as its green credentials and overall contributions to the American economy. The ad coincided with Toyota’s 50th anniversary in the United States and with rising attention to its neck-and-neck battle with GM for U.S. sales supremacy.

“It’s about Americans building American-made and designed products and building where we sell,” said Sturm, the Toyota executive. “But we’re not putting up an American flag when we do this. You’re not going to see that either from us or the brand.”

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