After years of up and down going sales, the luxury brand Pontiac has gone finally out of business, due to the GM-policy. Pontiac has always been one of the most iconic brands of the US car industry. Established in 1926, when the brand was originally aiming at the working class, Pontiac grew out to a luxury brand in the 1960s and 70s. This evolution was caused by General Motors, that gave the brand, which sales were declining, a new image: Pontiac would build sport cars with a muscle image from then off. In the 1990s the brand got some problems: technical problems and a middle-of-the-road image damaged the company's reputation and sales went extremely down. This image problem was still unsolved in the 2000s, which gave GM the opportunity to cut down the loss-making brand.
This article proves very clearly the difficulty in keeping a brand's reputation high. Pontiac was initially not a luxury brand, but making it a luxury brand was a way to upgrade the company's declining sales in the 1950s. Nevertheless, transform a "normal" brand into a luxury brand isn't without risk. For a brand with a high image it is very important to keep its reputation at the same level. When something goes wrong in production or marketing, the brand isn't cool any more. As a consequence the loyal consumers will stop buying the damaged brand and another market segment will not start to buy the product, because of its exclusive character. This all will lead to declining sales and when nobody undertakes some action, the brand will go bankrupt...
I also read about this in an other news paper ( De Standaard). It's absolutely true what you say about luxury brands and keeping the image high. In the article that I read, they said that there was also a problem with the technological side of the Pontiac cars. The builders were no longer able to find new technologies and so the cargadget were always outdated.
BeantwoordenVerwijderenFor luxury products and even for almost every product it is very important to keep their image the way they would like it to. Because people will always give products a position in the market and it is up to marketeers to help people do their product placement in a way it is favorable for the product. Marketeers also have the possibility to influence this product placement, for example what occured to vinyl records and their transfer from the living room to the disco.
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