Chrysler was about an inch away from liquidation, but you’d never know it from the automaker’s chest-thumping new television ads.
General Motors has just entered bankruptcy, but from that automaker’s new TV ad, you’d think an apologetic GM had kicked your puppy.
Two of Detroit’s Big Three automakers have found themselves dealing with the same situation: bankruptcy. But they are portraying their companies in vastly different ways.
General Motors — once so mighty that it made half of all new cars in the United States — has humbled itself before the American consumer.
Its new television ad begins with a man’s voice intoning: “Let’s be completely honest. No company wants to go through this. . . . General Motors needs to start over to get stronger.”
The ad, a montage of images seemingly meant to show everyday American life, is part of a multimedia campaign called “re: invention” that includes a corporate website where consumers can track the company’s progress through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
“Because the only chapter we’re interested in,” the GM ad concludes, “is Chapter One.”
The campaign is the result of consumer research beginning in December, when the company’s executives were pilloried for haughtily coming to Washington — on a private jet — to ask for aid. After that fiasco, GM asked consumers: What do we need to do to regain your trust?
“They just kept giving us the same feedback — that we need to be brutally honest,” said Jay Spenchian, GM’s executive director of North American marketing strategy. “We need to ‘man up,’ was one of the terms that came out of the focus groups.”
Consumers evidently told Chrysler a different story, based on that automaker’s ads, which focus on its products, not its bankruptcy.
This might have some logic to it: Unlike GM, which is going through bankruptcy alone, Chrysler needed bankruptcy plus an alliance with another automaker — Fiat — to avoid being dissolved and sold for parts.
Chrysler launched its new ads last month. One is focused on the corporation, but the others feature vehicles. The theme is “We build . . .” and show, for instance, a sports car burning rubber under the text, “We build rockets.”
