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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When the Japanese emerged from the rubble of World War II, Made in Japan stood for shoddy products, like toys that fell apart.

Then Japanese manufacturers learned statistical quality control methods from W. Edwards Deming, a curmudgeonly professor of statistics at New York University who’d been invited to Japan to conduct seminars for corporate executives in 1950.

Deming (1900–1993), who’d grown up dirt poor in a tar-paper shack in Powell, Wyoming, and had gone on to earn a doctorate in mathematical physics at Yale, had a rigorous approach to quality control.

His method was (if you’ll pardon a huge oversimplification) to keep a careful tally of the number of product defects, figure out what caused them, fix the problems, measure how much the quality improved after that, and then keep refining the manufacturing process to get it as close to zero-defect perfection as possible.

By the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese had mastered Dr. Deming’s methods well enough to capture huge swathes of the U.S. market for everything from automobiles to cameras and consumer electronics.

Anecdotal evidence helped: Over time, people noticed that those boxy little cars from Datsun (now Nissan) were built so tough, you practically had to beat them with a stick to make them stop running.

I wasn’t an early convert to anything made in Japan myself, especially not cars. I’d always been a great believer in American iron.

I’d had a 1978 Chevy Nova that never gave me any trouble, and I expected all American cars to run that good. But then I bought my first lemon, and then a second and a third.

I had a run of bad luck with a Cadillac, a Chevy Malibu and finally a Ford Taurus that died of catastrophic transmission failure before I could finish paying for it.

I’d also driven enough American rental cars on road trips — and had experienced enough problems with them — to grow disenchanted with U.S. automobile brands.

It was finally time to take that big step and risk buying a Japanese car. I’ve never had cause to regret it: My 1990 Mazda Miata has a little over 317,000 miles (507,200 kilometers) on its odometer and still runs good.

My little red Miata would have had a lot more miles on it by now if I hadn’t clocked 146,000 miles (234,964 kilometers) on my 1997 BMW Z3. (To digress at length: yes, I fell for the German engineering line, although I must admit that BMW’s advertising is no longer quite so arrogantly off-putting as it used to be when the account was handled by the agency formerly known as Prince — uh, I mean Ammirati & Puris, a creative boutique that, through a series of mergers and acquisitions, disappeared into Lowe Worldwide. Back in the 1980s the BMW print ads used to read like they’d been written by angry little men in bowties. I have no way of proving this, but I could have sworn those ads gave BMW owners a bad attitude and subtly influenced their road manners; it was almost as if they’d drive their overpriced little cars, thinking, “Get out of my way — can’t you see I’m driving a BMW?”).

Anyway, back to Japan: These days not all Japanese products are made in Japan. Japanese automobiles, cameras and consumer electronic products are manufactured all over the world — including the U.S.

And there’s mounting anecdotal evidence that that has had adverse effects on the perceived quality of Japanese products. Some Japanese cars, for instance, have been found to have so many glitches that they’ve slipped in J.D. Power consumer satisfaction surveys.

Ultimately it comes down to the question of a brand’s provenance. Will U.S. consumer perceptions change, and will customers eventually wise up and learn to distinguish between products that are actually manufactured in Japan and those that are Japanese in the sense that they are Japanese brands manufactured in other countries?

What does this augur for Japanese brands down the road?

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