Cool News finds the Purple Cow
…in Detroit. reveries – marketing insights and ideas. Here’s an excerpt:
Nissan’s “Carlos Ghosn recently declared that design was now on a part with investment strategy, the most fateful decision a modern corporation can make.”
Indeed, the auto “industry’s economics,” Mr. Jenkins goes on to suggest, “have also become impressively Hollywood-like … Nowadays,” he observes, “any reward for shareholders will have to come from gratuitous profits earned on ‘hot models’ that customers are willing to pay more than a commodity-box price for.” It’s a trend that started with the “retrofusion” of the new Beetle and Chrysler’s PT Cruiser, and continued with “the 2001 Thunderbird, this year’s Chevy SSR and next year’s Ford GT. That pace picked up, Mr. Jenkins suggests, with “the Bauhaus-inspired Audi TT … and a series of Volvo non-boxes inflected with the sensibility of Swedish furniture design.”