For a now rapidly dwindling segment of elderly car buyers who fondly recall the grand old General Motors (GM) brand in its heyday, a boulevard barge with a plush interior and a Cadillac badge on its nose may still be the ultimate statement of luxury.

Back in 2003 Buick, a struggling brand then in its 100th year, tried to evoke its heritage by resurrecting GM’s flamboyant automobile stylist Harley Earl (1893–1969).

For reasons that were never made clear, GM apparently thought it had an appealing spokesman in Earl, whose dubious design legacy included such touches as rakish tailfins, lots of chrome, and two-tone paint.

The McCann-Erickson ads for Buick with John Diehl (Detective Larry Zito on Miami Vice) as the fedora-wearing ghost of Harley Earl were embarrassing. They bombed, of course, and Buick sales continued their slide.

It was a questionable strategy — and not just because of Earl’s tailfins-and-chrome reputation or the fact that his star had waned after consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, a hugely influential book that excoriated automobile designers for their preoccupation with looks at the expense of safety.

Perhaps the real reason Buick’s campaign failed is that history is not America’s favorite subject: 45 years after Harley Earl’s retirement, few people knew who he was.

It wasn’t the first time an obscure old guy had been featured in automobile advertising. Nissan had launched its Mr. K campaign back in 1996. The ads featured a stand-in for a sprightly octogenarian named Yukata Katayama (also known as Mr. K).

The Chiat/Day advertising campaign for Nissan starred actor Dale Ishimoto, a decorated Japanese-American veteran who’d served with the storied 442nd Regimental Combat Team in World War II. In the ads, Ishimoto played Mr.K, who’d had, among other things, the good sense to rechristen the Datsun Fairlady as the Datsun 240Z when it was first introduced in the U.S. in 1970.

Mr. Katayama was revered by a devoted coterie of diehard American fans who fondly recalled his efforts on behalf of the sturdy little cars made by Datsun, the name under which Nissan cars and trucks had originally been sold in the United States (the ads, by the way, didn’t attempt to trace the brand’s lineage, and didn’t mention the fact that the name Datsun was changed to Nissan in the U.S. in 1981).

The assumptions underlying Chiat/Day’s creative strategy appear to have been that millions of car-buyers would know who Mr. Katayama was, and that they were familiar with the story of what he had done to establish the Nissan brand in the U.S.

Unfortunately for Nissan they didn’t, and sales predictably plummeted.

The question is, even if the car-buying public had known who Mr. K was, would they have cared?

Copyright © 2008 The Graham Agency. All rights reserved.

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