Pontiac GTO
Today, General Motors will announce the demise of the Pontiac brand.
Pontiac was the performance brand of the GM lineup, make famous by many things, among them the GTO model, permanently enshrined in the muscule car metaphoria of my generation via this Ronny and the Daytonas number:
Little GTO, you’re really lookin’ fine
Three deuces and a four speed and a 389
Listen to her tachin’ up now, listen to her why-ee-eye-ine
C’mon and turn it on, wind it up, blow it out GTO
Not even Oprah‘s endorsement could save the brand — though she did here darndest by giving an antire talk show audience a G6 back in September of 2004.
In technology sectors, performance has been a perennial favorite differentiator: I am reminded of the great scene from “This is Spinal Tap.” Will Pontiac’s death be a harbinger for other industries?
Is the social and political climate (pun intended) now turning against attributes that represent “faster, stronger, higher?”
I don’t think so, but I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=c8e9e59d-a3a8-4764-b592-ced9aa3db3e0)
{ 4 comments }
Performance for the sake of performance alone doesn’t seem to work anymore. Pontiac had one more notable: The TransAm (which is more of our generation than the GTO.) Smokey was very popular… Hell, I had a CB!
Anyway, I think you touched on something in your last paragraph: Social Media now is more of a climate indicator / monitoring than anything else – almost like a bunch of radio stations broadcasting the temperature without being burdened by FCC requirements. The challenge brands now have is finding ways to monitor, broadcast, control the temperature – simultaneously.
Thanks John… appreciate your continued readership and support.
Performance auto brands: Do you count Mustang as one?
Would it surprise you to know that the majority of Mustang owners are women (something that’s been true for 20+ years, according to a friend that worked at Ford)? I think performance car brands (the way you remember them) haven’t really existed in the US auto maker’s line ups for a long time.
If you could separate performance from looks of a car, the closest modern attempt is probably Chrysler trying to bring back Hemi brand for engines (which it used across a lot of different cars that each had normal and “performance” versions).
Mustang made a respectable comeback with the Bullitt car, but they’ve had a rough way to go since that mid-80s redesign with such poor build quality. My broader question is: “Does today’s climate — socially and economically — put ‘performance branding’ in any industry out of fashion, at least temporarily?” I’d hate to think this is true, but my gut says it is.
Comments on this entry are closed.