Acura: Can Style Save Honda's Luxury Brand?
March 20, 2008

By Jane Nakagawa

In 1986, Honda became the first Japanese manufacturer to launch a separate luxury franchise, Acura. Now it’s been the first to dedicate a design studio exclusively for its luxury lineup. Yet despite these accomplishments, Acura hovers in the shadow of Lexus and even Infiniti.

It’s easy to admire the unassuming nature that sets Honda apart from Nissan, or the passion for innovation that sets it apart from Toyota. But this is Acura, not Honda, and Acura’s turf is luxury. Luxury is daring. It makes you dream. Does Acura have what it takes to make it?

The Studio
The new Acura Design Studio opened its doors for the first and last time to journalists May 24, 2007. In quintessential Honda form, the event was marked by civility and little fanfare. Located just behind Honda’s North American headquarters in Torrance, Calif., the studio is the culmination of a building effort that began in March 2006 when the groundbreaking ceremony marked the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Acura brand.

The new building is similar in look and feel to the headquarters building — an unpretentious glass-and-steel structure adjacent to a parking lot. Unlike design studios such as Nissan Design America — where you marvel at the unusual bathroom fixtures and gawk at the rooftop tennis court, but are never quite sure where to park — Acura's design center is all about form following function. In fact, this building may have been designed from the inside out, much like Honda’s cars and trucks.

Acura is most proud of the studio's layout. Here, the exterior and interior vehicle designers work side by side rather than in separate buildings, ensuring maximum collaboration. You might think this is hardly a breakthrough, but in an industry in which exterior designers rule the earth, this egalitarian layout is yet one more indication of how seriously the Acura takes practicality and function.

Speaking of function, the studio is built to be LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified. No surprise here, as Honda brought us the clean-air CVCC engine, the Insight hybrid and a North American lineup that can claim the highest corporate fuel-economy rating, period. And all this happened way before Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Brand Strategy
Acura’s goal is to become a first-tier luxury nameplate and John Mendel, executive vice president, Automotive Operations, American Honda Motor Co. Inc., is charged with making it happen.

"Acura has finished its orbit around Honda, and now it's ready to go out on its  own. It's been a very effective intercept brand for us, but now we're ready to move it up-market as a luxury name," Mendel said. “What Acura is going to be in the future is delivering a driving experience and performance across everything you do at a level that’s unique in the marketplace in terms of man-machine interface.”

In discussing the relative positioning of Acura versus other luxury makes, Mendel said the company would be less like Lexus or Mercedes-Benz, and more like Audi or BMW. He said, “(Acura will be) more in (the) direction of performance luxury versus country club luxury. Even within that perceptual map, there’s an area that’s even more sports and more luxury that holds an opportunity for us. You can have both. (They are) not mutually exclusive.”

Mendel wants to deliver “livable performance,” where the driver can take or leave as much power as he/she desires at that moment, rather than have to live with the kind of sacrifices required by the “finicky” high-performance cars of the past.

When asked about the market presence of Acura, Mendel said the goal is to be the “best in every segment where we compete,” and at 200,000 to 300,000 units a year, the franchise is “big enough.”  Rather than discuss lofty volume targets, Mendel reiterated the company’s goal to achieve “extremely high levels of customer satisfaction.” 

Design Strategy
With the exception of the original Legend, styling has been a weakness for Acura. But these days the executives are at least saying the right things. “Our goal is to create emotional designs that create a strong and distinct image for Acura products,” said Toshiko Nonaka, president of Honda R&D Americas. Added Dick Colliver, executive vice president, Automotive Sales, “The effort to distinguish Acura in the marketplace begins with design.” 

All eyes are on Jon Ikeda, principal designer and manager of exterior design at the Acura Design Center. Ikeda is the quintessential car designer of his era — he loves fast European sports cars and says he might someday dabble in furniture design. It’s easy to picture him in his days as a student at the Art Center College of Design, racing around in a Volkswagen Scirocco. He is passionate about Formula 1 racing and has confessed to loading up his iPod with videos of racing footage from in-car cameras.

Ikeda refers to Acura’s new design essence as “keen-edge dynamic.” He said, "We've always embraced technology at Acura. And we've always thought the man-machine relationship was very important. So we took those two elements as the key things we had to express in our shapes. "The technology portion of the styling you can see in the sheer, machined surfaces. The emotional aspects you see in the lines as they fade in and out, a little more random, like something from nature."   

Unfortunately for Ikeda, the Advanced Sedan Concept and the Advanced Sports Car Concept — the two concept vehicles that embody keen-edge  dynamic as we know it — received only a lukewarm reception last year.

The real world hasn't been particularly enthusiastic about Acura, either. Sales declined 4 percent from 2005 to 2006, and then fell a further 10 percent last year. Sales in 2007 amounted to only 180,104 units compared with a high of 209,610 in 2005. This decline also reflects an overall waning of interest in the brand, as consumer page views of Acura at Edmunds.com are down 24 percent over a ten-year period.

What’s Holding Acura Back?
Where cars are concerned, emotional design has historically been translated as high performance and all the styling cues that go with it — long hood, fender flares, dual exhausts.

These are not just old ideas, but increasingly irrelevant ideas within the context of congested roads, alternative fuels, emerging hybrid powertrains, and most important, the idea of new luxury. From Louis Vuitton to Target, shelves are now filled with objects that sell not just function but also feeling.

You have to wonder, why hasn’t this epiphany hit the designers in the auto industry? The timing couldn’t be more perfect for a car company to establish a new kind of luxury. If Acura stays its present course, its practical but lifeless persona will sink the company to the bottom of the luxury segment. Even loyal customers might presently describe Acura as “intelligent,” “competent,” or even go out on a limb and say “really nice.” Do you remember how your parents talked about the people they wanted you to date? Did you want to date them?

The world of luxury was very different in 1986 when Acura was introduced. Mercedes-Benz and BMW defined traditional luxury, and Japanese makes were relegated to a being a value proposition. Back then Acura was right: German cars were too expensive to buy and even more expensive to maintain, and customers were ready for a value proposition in the luxury segment.

But since then the competition has caught on. Even as the Lexus LS sedan evolved into a true flagship of luxury and technology, Acura stubbornly allowed the RL to languish in its own category of one. It has taken Infiniti longer than Lexus to get its act together, but the G, M and FX series effectively make Infiniti, not Acura, the sporty Japanese luxury brand. In addition, the growth of the leasing market enables consumers to drive cars they only dreamed of owning before, so the value proposition in luxury is dead.

It's admirable for Honda to be obsessively solution-oriented. But in luxury, the promise of a brand reaches far beyond the rational. Customers don’t want to be merely reassured; they want to be inspired — inspired about how great the future is going to be. Honda can lead from the brain, but Acura must lead from both the brain and the heart.

Styling is the best and quickest way to help consumers understand this vision.  So the establishment of Acura's own design studio comes at the right moment.

But does Acura have a real vision? In luxury, a flaw is not necessarily a defect. A flaw asks for forgiveness. It’s endearing, and it evokes passion. Most of all, a flaw makes something real. Machines have defects or errors; humans have flaws. Honda is well aware of this phenomenon with its remarkable robot, Asimo. He turns the errors in his behavior and performance into flaws, and the way he does it makes us think of him as almost human. If luxury is about feeling, then Asimo expresses a more humane sense of luxury than Acura.

The Shape of Things to Come
We expect the front-engine Advanced Sports Car Concept will be the template for the forthcoming Acura NSX with its V10 engine. Of his concept's design, Ikeda said, “Our intention is to design an exotic race car that gracefully combines advanced technology and strong emotion.”    

2008 will be a critical year for Acura. On Wednesday, Acura unveiled the 2009 Acura TSX. The jury is still out on reaction to it. Last month at the Chicago auto show, the automaker presented its RL flagship sedan with some useful styling and equipment changes. No one noticed. The RDX, while stylish, is not segment-busting. This means the next-generation TL, NSX and, most important, the RL, must possess styling so incredible that not only does your heart skip a beat every time you look at them, but you almost feel guilty for owning something so beautiful.

Now might be a good time for Acura to invite some designers from the Asimo project to lend a helping hand — because styling is what will save Acura.

Photos by Honda/Acura
1 - 2009 Acura TSX introduced at New York auto show Wednesday.
2 - Grand opening of Acura's California Design Studio
3 - John Mendel introduces Acura MDX at 2007 New York auto show
4 - Acura Advanced Sedan Concept (left)
5 - Acura Advanced Sports Car Concept (right)
6 - Dick Colliver introduces the 2009 Acura RL at 2008 Chicago auto show in February

Posted by at 4:01 AM under Business , Companies | Comments (5) | digg this | Seed Newsvine