Little bit different. Dodge Ram Trucks were a thing for a long time with an OK following. Dodge decided to just simplify things to just Ram Trucks. Nothing else really changed. They weren’t attacking a different market segment through the name change or narrowing focus. It’s branding, plain and simple.
The GMC/Denali suggestion is specifically about narrowing focus to the higher-end segment. Denali vehicles have a pretty favorable perception when compared to GMC. The low-end GMC truck and the low-end Chevy truck are withing $1500 of each other in price. This suggestion does away with the “professional-grade” positioning in favor of a more upscale focus which aligns with Buick’s purpose. This is a marketing change, more strategic.
To continue playing armchair CEO, I’d transition the “professional-grade” persona to Chevy by creating a “Pro” trim level or something that can sit a half-rung up from the base models and adds some of those bells and whistles your foreman may want.
Yup, this is pretty much correct. That said, it was a short sighted decision. What that company really needed was to invest in making Chrysler a viable brand with new, compelling products. Hanging onto the Plymouth name probably delayed that reality check until it was basically too late. They caught lightning in a bottle with the 300 and squandered it entirely. Catering to the dealers fucked them.
There’s an alternate reality where Chrysler is a really strong brand today selling a 3rd generation 300 that’s winning against Lincolns, Buicks and Lexus, the premium minivan in a re-imagined Pacifica and a mid-sized SUV that steals from Jeep and caters to the leather & chrome crowd who couldn’t give a crap about off-road capability. Instead they badge engineered Ddoge/Chrysler/Plymouths and launched the laughable 200 while temporarily killing the minivan line as people ran towards small SUVs and compacts during the oil price spike.
If I recall correctly, the company that we now know as General Motors bought up a competitor that made trucks way back in the dim dark ages. That company signed the merger with some kind of clause that “you will always continue to produce our trucks”, and “those trucks” became GMC although that was not their original badge prior to the merger.
The company that we now know as General Motors was not (contrary to what I would have guessed) originally Chevrolet which then bought up other companies and added them to their line. Instead it was essentially Buick. (Which may explain why the corporation discarded Oldsmobile and Pontiac but kept Buick) (I would have kept Pontiac). Anyway, Chevrolet came along later and had their own trucks line, I guess (?) but the original merger contract kept them from discontinuing GMC trucks and just doing Chevy trucks. So I was told. Which I guess gives this post all the authority of any other urban legend.
That is a lot of answer I think also considering that GM can’t just decide in a vacuum what its points of sale will be. The dealers in orbit around GM have influence over it, not just the other way around. GM didn’t keep Pontiac and Olds for so long because GM the corporation was convinced that remained such a great idea, but the political difficulty of actually doing away with them. Like other deep seated GM problems, the bankruptcy helped make progress on this issue but didn’t solve it. Chevy, Buick, Cadillac, GMC is probably still too many brands, sold by too many dealerships which are too small on average each. It’s not because GM management thinks that’s ideal as a way to build it from the ground up, it’s just hard to consolidate businesses you don’t actually own. You can’t force them to merge, ones you strip of dealer status aren’t going to give the resources to the remaining ones to grow to a more economic scale, etc.
Near me there’s a GMC-only dealer though, probably not the only one. They sell (true) commercial trucks alongside GMC personal vehicles (SUV/pickup).
From what I’ve always heard, they kept Buick because Buicks sell really well in China. Supposedly GM’s management was divided over whether to keep Buick or Pontiac, but their popularity in China tipped the balance in Buick’s favor.
ETA: Spanked. That’ll teach me to not refresh the page before replying.
Sorry to hijack the thread away from GM and back to Chrysler again, but this whole discussion about the influence of dealers and making it difficult to kill a car brand reminded of Chrysler’s short-lived Eagle marque. That brand’s sole reason for existing was because the former AMC dealers wanted a line of cars to sell in addition to the Jeeps. So Chrysler put together this odd mix of former AMC-Renault models, badge-engineered Mitsubishis, and badge-engineered Chryslers, and called it Eagle.
There are a bunch of details that fall out of this (one underlying platform means a big savings in Development costs), and there are some people that’d buy a Buick but would never be caught dead in a Chevy. The underpinnings are similar, the exteriors are very different (different body stampings, brightwork, headlights…very little is shared) as are the interiors.
It’s an economic rule: If you can sell one model for $10…and paint it different and sell it to someone with more money for $20…You only sell to two populations…if you can also sell the same thing for $12, $14, and $18…then you capture more of the market at the financial threshold of pain that the buyer is willing to spend. You get $14 from a guy that’s unwilling to spend $20 and $18 from someone that wouldn’t want the $10 edition but doesn’t want to afford the $20 one.
And for Gatopescado - that says more about you than GMC. NO vehicle brand could stay in business if they made a truly substandard product. Ford is Good, GMC is Good, Toyota, Hyundai, Mercedes and FIAT are good.
There’s an economic concept called price discrimination which is a big part of car selling. For one thing even at a given dealer customers haggle and the dealer gets what the each customer is willing to pay rather than a fixed price (except a small % of very naive customers who pay sticker price on cars not in extraordinary demand or the few cars that are). And it’s also a factor in different brands of the same company.
But, one of GM’s big problems, another one partially but not wholly solved by the bankruptcy/restructuring, was/is form over substance brand marketing that too far. To the point at times where it wasn’t that big an exaggeration to say certain ‘higher’ margue models were just Chevy’s ‘painted different’. Though that was still an exaggeration, and it’s more or one now. But not as much an exaggeration as when people say, and some do, that Lexus is just a Toyota with a few bells and whistles. That’s basically bullshit. It’s not as bullshiticle in GM’s case and that’s still a problem for them.
All major car companies put out a basically acceptable product for the most part. They aren’t remotely close to being equal, and your own point (which I partially accept) in 1. is a reason why the relatively inferior companies don’t just entirely disappear. ‘Too Big to Fail’ is obviously another reason. Let’s eschew whataboutism (IOW not go on a tangent about banks when talking about car companies). Was GM bailed out because the world really needed its skills and abilities as a car company? No, its liquidation just would have been too disruptive for reasons nothing to do with whether it’s really as good a car company as some others.
Not that I think all GM vehicles are ‘piles of crap’, I like fast cars and respect what GM has done (Chevy and Cadillac) in the performance area in recent years especially. On paper. However I’ve never come close to buying a GM car (since my used '85 Buick, which was OK, got a good deal on it) when I compare and review, especially on reliability, another of the chronic problems they’ve only partially addressed over the years.
Maybe some, but far fewer than there once were. Buicks still sold well in the 1980s and 90s because there were still enough older people around who still considered Buick a prestigious brand. The problem is that younger people don’t consider it a prestigious brand, they just consider it an old person’s car. And as the saying goes, you can sell an old person a young person’s car, but you can’t sell a young person an old person’s car. The younger people who would never be caught dead in a Chevy and can afford it are more likely to just buy a Cadillac (or more likely a Lexus or BMW).
I used to work for GM in the marketing support divisioin, which is a sales-adjacent job that required us to know literally everything about every single GM vehicle in order to answer questions from prospective buyers.
There is NO difference between GMC and Chevy trucks aside from badging, sometimes a slightly different grill design and an occasional color option. Zero. To the point where sometimes dealers had to return shipments of GMC trucks that were mistakenly badged as Chevy and vice versa. Same trucks in every detail but can’t sell 'em if the badges are wrong.
For that matter, the Pontiac Vibe was the cheapest Toyota Matrix you could get and the Chevrolet Prizm the cheapest Toyota Corolla. Exact same cars aside from the name plate, assembled in the same plant, part of a marketing ploy to get around import limitations.
Them little Ford Ranger trucks they used to sell were Mazdas and the little S-10 Chevy trucks were Isuzus.
There’s a lotta cross pollination in the car industry.
Hehe, I had a Ford. And it was indeed found on road dead. Of course, I’ve also had a Honda, a BMW, a Mazda, a Nissan, and even a Volvo, all found on road dead.
Yeah, I’ve had Subarus, Mazdas, Vettes, Caddys, GMCs, a Diesel Silverado, A couple Beemer motorcycles, a Honda motorcycle, A PT Cruiser (yeah, whatever, I enjoyed it)
Some were more or less expensive, some were more or less idiosyncratic…all were vehicles I was happy with while I had them.
The 1992 Mercedes 400E with 188k miles on it is built like a tank and nearly everything still works on it. Bought it for $1k for the kids. It was a $65k car in 1992.
Anyone with strong opinions that ‘Brand X is crap’ has an opinion based on emotion. They all have the same bearing vendor, they all use the same wheel hubs and tires, the radiators, A/C compressors, spark plugs, and speakers are all farmed out.
Vehicle ownership is an emotional experience based on perceived need. Else we’d all be driving around in the same, boring, two seat three wheeled 2 cylinder diesel econoboxes…and would rent a pickup on the one weekend a year we needed it.
I didn’t know that specifically, but I’m also not familiar with the statement by other posters that GMC is really supposed to have a different price point or image than Chevy trucks. I mean sure they have different commercials, but my impression was just that a GMC truck is a Chevy sold by Buick dealers or sometimes standalone GMC Truck dealers (who do most of their business in commercial truck) and nobody is pretending it’s any better.
Where GM was notorious in the past was some more expensive Buick or even Caddy models (eg. Cimarron) that were way too close to be being the same as cheaper Chevy models. They aren’t as bad with that now I don’t think.
I bought a used one once. The theory was to get a Corolla for a lower price. Prizms’s were distinctly cheaper than base Corolla’s apparently just because they had a GM badge rather than a Toyota one. It didn’t work out so well with that particular car because it both had more problems than expected and I decided it was just too small, so sold it after not that long…and it was still selling at a discount to Corolla’s.