---

See more posts by Dave Bry

3 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

0 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

36 comments

Jon Methven is the author of This Is Your Captain Speaking, due out in 2012 by Simon & Schuster. He can be reached here, or follow him on Twitter @jonmethven.

---

See more posts by Jon Methven

12 comments

---

See more posts by Alex Balk

18 comments

The first day began with the Car of the Year awards, and the first of many bad metaphors to come: “Michigan’s film industry is also booming, so to put this in film terms: this is the feel-good movie of the year, and the NAIAS is the theater.” On stage, the CEOs lined up almost Von Trapp-style, except for that one guy on the right. The Chevy Volt beat out the all-electric Nissan Leaf and the nobody-cared Hyundai Sonata for the award, and a bunch of people yelled in excitement. As my Japanese colleagues noted, it isn’t really an electric car, and it would be nice if they stopped lying and just called it a hybrid.

I later found out that Nissan didn’t even bother setting up a booth at the show, having decided, probably wisely, to focus on China and India instead. No word on whether they’ve gone as far as Cadillac to court the Chinese consumer, though. (Also, having a film called “The Birth of a Party" about the rise of your Communist Party just doesn't sound right.)

For the next few hours, I alternated between watching our pile of equipment and moving our pile of equipment somewhere else while my boss, the anchorman, did some reports from the floor. Each car company has a complex unto itself, giant booths for giant wares. Acura has an open espresso bar with little pretzel almond toffee stick snacks, but I’m stuck watching the stuff near Toyota’s joke stretch minivan. It’s called the “swagger wagon,” and goes along with a black and white ad of white parents rapping about something. It’s playing on a loop on a giant screen without sound, so I’m just gonna guess that it’s a little bit funny, a little bit cringey.

Toyota’s big press conference was for the new “Prius family,” featuring a station wagon, a little coupey guy, and a plug-innable Prius. In keeping with the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi (N.B.: j/k), all of the music during the presentation seemed to be Wii-generated.

I only see Detroit itself from the rental car in the middle of the day, when I have to drive my boss to the airport. For such a famously blighted city, it seems pretty much like any other boring place, distinguished only by the highway signs for the Bridge to Canada and its angry public art. For lack of expertise and fear of offending those Detroit scholars out there, I will keep it to one comment: The GM tower complex resembles nothing so much as Orthanc, the Black Tower of Isengard, and I commend the journalists of the bailout for not making more comparisons along those lines. (I guess Ents=UAW?!)

Gen Yers, or Millennials, or what have you, are notoriously uninterested in buying cars, and our withholding seems to have driven the car companies mad with desire. Besides the booth babes (who I thank for the many mints), I’m probably the youngest person here, so let me just say: as much as we youngs like iPads, and think that playing instruments on iPads is the coolest thing ever, and love having parties on stage while a bunch of old guys in suits watch us have our awesome iPad instrument parties, we still probably won’t buy a Chevy.

A Hyundai, on the other hand, now that’s a totally different story! The company’s Detroit press conference kicked off a new campaign, with both a new, totally not generic/insipid slogan (“New Thinking. New Possibilities.”) and a new “brand theme song." Turns out they had a hard time coming up with the theme song, though, so, as the CEO told us, they “wondered if it could be found… by having OUR CARS PLAY A GIANT MUSIC BOX.”

Unsurprisingly, after designing and filming an elaborate hanging steel paddle system wherein a bunch of cars with sticks welded on their roofs could hammer out a song, they found what they were looking for. GMB-based composition is known for its results-based performance in the corporate jingle field.

After a juiced-up PowerPoint interlude, Hyundai hit paydirt: “a new car segment aligned with the needs of Generation Y.” And what might those needs be? Efficiency? Cheapness? Ability to serve as temporary home when it becomes clear that our apartment is made of nothing but bedbugs and drywall? Wrong! We need “The Urban Offroad,” a car called "The Curb" that can handle anything, “from potholes to nightclubs,” and rolls on 22s, which are only 2 inches away from 24s—the most urban of tire dimensions. It also has retractable bike rack, "so the owner could park and ride a 'Fixie' (fixed gear) bike to the rest of his destinations as an alternative transportation source."

But, in case urban as an adjective isn’t quite your thing, Hyundai’s got another car for your youth-having lifestyle: The Veloster. No, it isn’t a French bicycle with claws, nor a sea bug that’s somehow grown wheels, it’s just a kind of sporty looking three-door car. According to the panel of paid youth representatives that get on stage when the thing is unveiled, though, it’s so much more. Shaved-head-with-blazer man says he’s into “performance,” and wants a car that’s both practical and fun, “but that’s just me.” Slight-dude-with-cardigan just graduated from design school and got a great job in a new city, but he misses his friends, and he’s not the best at texting, so he’s really into how the car lets you yell stuff and then sends that as a text. (One can imagine the autocorrect joy/horror).

And for cute-girl-with-long-skirt who loves fashion, the Veloster is not her first place, it's not her second—“it’s kind of becoming my third place.” Because after the exciting, extremely social, hyper-creative lives we lead in our homes and offices, we really need a tiny pod—with doors that lock—for our “third place."

Shortly after the youth representatives finish their brand sculpting, the PowerPoint resumed. Over a picture of the Veloster against a forest background, the words “PARADIGM SHIFT,” just like that, all caps, slid in from the left. I felt a mix of disgust and excitement at being treated so crassly. I am still always astonished at how, of all the books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen and music I’ve listened to, Dilbert remains the truest to life.

Sam Dean is a writer (and occasional TV producer). He lives in Brooklyn.

---

See more posts by Sam Dean

7 comments

But the romance of the brand is a notoriously ephemeral thing, as any casual survey of thrift-store Tickle-Me Elmo and Tamagotchi displays will promptly demonstrate. To do the job right, in this as in so many other realms, we would do well to heed the example of the Germans. As Bloomberg’s Chris Reiter reports, Deutschland’s Big Three automakers—BMW, Mercedes, and Audi (now a Volkswagen property)—have long been locked into a battle for the overtaxed attention spans of the youth market.

Back in February, Audi made a dramatic bid for high-end kiddie allegiance with a $13,300 model of a 1930s roadster, evidently calculating that a Weimar-era collectible is the perfect bridge to the true sturm-und-drang of a privileged adolescence. The model comes replete with “an aluminum frame, hydraulic brakes, seven speeds, leather-clad steering wheel, and oak dashboard,” and nearly sold out of its initial 500-unit manufacturing run, Reiter notes.

The idea behind such lush toy marketing, of course, is to instill intense brand-loyalty among the market’s littlest thought leaders. "Merchandising is important not because you can make huge money with it,” Audi sales chief Peter Schwarzenbauer tells Reiter, “but because it's another means of positioning your brand.” That means that Audi isn’t confining its initiatives to pint-sized drive trains, but is branching out to other durable badges of status, such as a $17,000-plus table soccer game—the idea here, evidently, being not so much to cultivate hooligan-style soccer fandom in the plutocratic young, but rather to inculcate the more genteel and respectable habit of full-scale team ownership.

It’s true that Audi isn’t neglecting more downmarket kiddie consumers in its push, with a $60 branded teddy bear and a $400 red-plastic version of the roadster; here, the functional array of model accessories include “an adjustable rollover bar, hand brake, over-sized tires with Audi-style rims, and padded seats.” But the main event is clearly the scrum for top-line market cachet, which is why Audi’s rivals are stepping up their game. Mercedes, for instance, is planning a spring rollout for “the foot-powered SLS Bobby-Benz, featuring headlights, grill, and rear end similar to those of the company's $183,000 SLS sportscar. The toy SLS features quiet-running tires, an Ackermann steering system with tight cornering for living-room maneuverability, and a steering wheel that absorbs impact to prevent injury in the event of a collision.” The model will boast a comparatively modest $120 asking price—but that loss-leader price point is a small sacrifice when you’re grooming future six-figure auto customers. "All the products have to live up to Mercedes' standards for quality and safety—especially our toys, which are all-time favorites with the next generation of Mercedes-Benz customers," reports Christian Boucke, who heads up the Benz accessories division.

BMW, meanwhile, appears to be the most horizontally minded lifestyle competitor in the luxe-branded market, brandishing a wide panoply of gear from a $460 kid-scale version of its M3 GT2 race car to a pair of $50 rain boots. The Beamer accessories division also turns a healthy 7 percentish profit—even though its brand-keepers, too, stress their real stake is in the longer-term loyalty game. “We are first and foremost a marketing initiative, and the main objectives are to broaden the brand's presence and strengthen loyalty," says Thomas Goerdt, who directs BMW’s distinctly un-German-sounding merchandising and lifestyle unit.

Still, the great risk of too-rampant accessory branding is market saturation—which is why Michel Gabriel, a branding specialist who has advised past Audi projectS, draws the line at underwear, even though “a lot of money can be made from a product” aimed at the intimate end of the brand market.

We can’t help thinking, though, that the Grosse Drei auto barons are selling short tomorrow’s financial titans with mere miniature knockoffs of luxury rides—and not just because their British competitor, Aston Martin, still owns the highest tip of the market with a Volante Junior model fetching a cool $24,000 with a devoted consumer base of young royals—who have duly gone on to modify their fullscale Astons to run on wine.

After all, the lesson of branding the world over is that a truly consummate brand eventually eclipses its mere material referent—hence the power of the glyphlike Nike swoosh (which only cost the firm $35 when design student Carolyn Davidson submitted in in 1971), or the “i”-themed Mac brand interface. Likewise, the business model for Mercedes has involved coaxing lavish multimillion-dollar subsidies from U.S. lawmakers at the same time it’s presented itself as an above-the-fray survivor of the 2008 global auto downturn.

Likewise, BMW has briskly seen to it that influential state congressional delegations have placed its own export interests ahead of the bailed-out U.S. auto industry—while Audi’s corporate parent Volkswagen has at least been candid in soliciting U.S. bailout funds, while also putting in for homeland funds to shore up its rickety loan operation. (Needless to say, this corporate pursuit of public-sector handouts doesn’t seem to have softened VW’s stand on American union drives, since like other foreign automakers, it’s expanded operations in anti-union right-to-work states to evade higher labor costs at home.) All of which is to say that, if doting plutocratic parents are looking to instill formative brand preferences this holiday season, nothing says “heed daddy’s example” like a simple, influence-subsidized government check. And Lord knows that for the properly connected family or industry, a good government kickback is about as hard to obtain as a pair BMW rain boots.

You, valued and valuable reader, are invited to join Chris Lehmann and your other fellow rich people to celebrate the publication of Rich People Things, this Thursday, December 2nd, at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City, from 7 to 9 p.m. There will even be a brief chit-chat with Thomas Frank and Maureen "Moe" Tkacik.

---

See more posts by Chris Lehmann

0 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

4 comments

---

See more posts by Choire Sicha

12 comments

Sorry for stealing the head of that Greek statue from your lawn.

You might not even have noticed it was missing. There was lots of stuff on your lawn. That's what brought us there that night, actually, to your street, the name of which I forget, if I ever knew it, in Highlands, New Jersey. There's a "Witches Lane" up around there somewhere, according to Google Maps, but that would be too perfect for this story, so that's probably not it. Anyway, yes, we-me and a car full of similarly intoxicated teenagers-we came to see your lawn, so different as it was from most lawns in our area. You'd made it into a display, a found-art project, a sculpture garden of carefully arranged junk. Old toys, mostly. Dolls, teddy bears, fire-trucks, action figures, all sorts of things, all weathered and sun-bleached, set on couches and pedestals. Legend had it that you'd had a child who had died years back, a son, and that every year on his birthday you added another toy to the collection. This could not have been completely accurate, because there must have been more than seventy pieces there-it looked like the cover of Sgt. Pepper's-and I don't think your house was even that old. But I don't know, maybe you added numerous items every year. Whatever the case, it looked creepy. And that story made it creepier. It was dark and secluded and so a fun place to park and smoke pot and stare at the all the unblinking dolls eyes til we got the heebie-jeebies and sped away.

This was in 1987, I think. Junior year of high school. My friend James and I had spent the early part of the evening at the Front Street Trattoria in Red Bank. There was no bar in the restaurant; it didn't have a liquor license. But we had worked there washing dishes the summer before, and the waitstaff let us drink with our dinner if we brought our own beer. We felt very grown up. We didn't act that way, though; pyramids of empties on the table-the privilege didn't last very long.

Everything was going great that night, though. We were chuffed and loaded when our friends Jen and Jen came to pick us up. There may have been another Jen in the car, too. (You're aware, I'm sure, of the popularity of the name Jen among girls born in the early 1970s.) And maybe another person, too. I don't remember too well. But there were a lot of us squeezed into the back seat when we set off without any particular destination.

We ended up at your house, of course, idling in front of your yard, passing a bowl around and trying to spook each other out. It was probably eleven o'clock or so when, in a burst of bad decision making obviously fueled by some insecure need to prove myself fearless and free-spirited, I opened the door, dashed out, grabbed the nearest artifact I could put my hands on, scrambled back in and shouted "Go!" Everyone was laughing and screaming as we peeled out. I felt heroic. Or anti-heroic. I felt just the way I wanted to feel.

Once we'd driven down the hill and got on the main road, street lights gave me a look at what was on my lap. It was the head of a Greek statue. A male head. That gray, plaster-cement stuff. I remember the smooth, hollow eyes and the molded curls in the hair. Like the head of an adventurer who'd met Medusa's gaze. The car got quieter, and whoever was driving, Jen I think, let it be known that she was not so happy to have stolen property in the car. Someone else started talking about how the thing was probably cursed. Suddenly, it didn't feel so good to be holding this head. Stoned as I was, I didn't like the idea of a curse. What if it blinked, or started talking? What if I woke up later that night, and it was propped next to my pillow? What if blood started to drip from the eyes? So as we drove over the bridge into Seabright, I rolled down the window, and leaned out as far as I could and heaved the thing over the side. Thank God there wasn't some late-night crabber down there, rowing himself to Bahr's Landing by flashlight-this apology would be addressed to someone else, and it would likely have been written from a very different place.

But this is an apology to you. I don't have a good excuse. I was an idiot kid who too often did idiot kid things. I really hope the story wasn't true, and that you were just an eccentric artist like the guy who built the big junk sculpture in the community garden on 6th Street and Ave. B. Eddie Boros was his name, he died a few years ago. I lived in a building adjacent to the garden when I first moved to the city. I would look out at the sculpture and think of your yard and feel a twinge of guilt. If the story was true, if you had lost a child, however many years before, and if (please have this not be the case) you noticed the missing statue head and that brought you even the slightest bit of further sadness, well, something like this whimsical little anecdote doesn't even begin to cover how really very, very sorry I am.

---

See more posts by Dave Bry

11 comments