[The_Blur]

General Motors is in the most competitive market on Earth. The United States is a fierce battleground for automotive sales, and GM once dominated. Since that golden age of GM sales, many of those products have gone out of production and the market has changed.

What GM needs is a collection of products that actually fills the full line of competing products. This actually serves as a combined duty of marketing and product development.

Sales consultants at Chevrolet dealers are advised to preach to customers the value of GM service centers. Customers who regularly use the service center where they bought their car are much more likely to purchase the same brand at the same dealership. That's why our salespeople push oil changes and other service at the local store.

The same is true of cars. I recently started an unscientific poll here on Camaro5, and a disproportionate number of members here started with a "sporty" car. I allowed the members to define what they saw as sporty. This suggests that GM should investigate the probability that a person who has one sporty product later purchases another.

A second hypothesis is also worth noting with this poll. Since so many of them identified their first car in the comments, it is worth noting that they also drove GM vehicles. The results, therefore, indicate that members drove sporty GM vehicles.

This is where GM needs the most help. As marketing professionals, it is your responsibility to define the driving experience for your clientele. Since GM is not a niche market manufacturer, unlike Subaru and Porsche, GM can define all sorts of driving as different parts of its lineup. GM most glaring failure of marketing, in my opinion, is the advertising for the 2010 Camaro V6. Rather than demonstrating the sporty nature of the vehicle, it was advertised as a fuel-efficient vehicle. At 29 mpg (at the time), it's hardly competitive with actually fuel-efficient cars. The Camaro V6 was obviously a success immediately. There was no risk of failure with a car that hot, but the implications are that GM doesn't know how to properly market its products. This detachment from the customers is what set GM on its market share slide.

How do we fix it? The product people need to set priorities, which they probably already do, when making a product, and those priorities need to be religiously advertised by the marketing team. If you build a Z28 as a track car, then the priority is track performance. As a result, marketing should sell the Z28 as a track car. This seems obvious enough, but the guys that build cars and the guys that sell cars are clearly not talking. The product team needs to be in charge of this process. Let your engineers decide what they want to accomplish with each vehicle, and then have the sales team sell it as it was designed.

Now that we've discuss the priority of engineering great cars and sales following the lead, let's discuss what vehicles GM needs to engineer in order to support what your own sales techniques are telling you to do. GM needs to produce sporty cars at all segments in order to maintain long-term sales of sporty cars at higher end segments. As an enthusiast, did you really expect me to advocate anything other than sporty cars? Let's be real, though. The last great entry level sporty car was the Cobalt SS Turbocharged. It smoked the competition in every possible way, and it was loved by young drivers. It was a car that a lot of us wish GM still produced. The void it left behind was quickly filled by sales to competing brands. Did you really think by killing the SS-badged Cobalt that those people would go buy a Cruze LTZ or a Sonic RS? Those drivers wanted a sporty car that is affordable and still has all the trimmings. It didn't have to be the fastest car at the Nurburgring, but it did have to run with sporty compacts of similar price. In fact, it doesn't have to handle perfectly or be perfectly engineered as long as it is somewhat better than the competition. I know that's hard to swallow since GM's engineers are so outstanding, but the bar only needs to be high enough to convincingly beat anyone else in the same segment. Just by offering a unique performance model of an existing compact, the other Cobalt owners were inspired, upgrading their bumpers and spoilers to SS bodies. It created a whole market driven by a car that at the time was advertised as fun to drive. I don't actually want to say Old GM did something right before it died, but they did what I'm asking you to do. They advertised a car as fun and sporty.

To conclude, I'll bring it full circle. Most of your GM enthusiasts that work at GM will tell you they once owned a classic car that they built, raced, or showed. They affordably purchased a performance car that was advertised as a winner. Today, the most affordable sporty car in the GM lineup is the V6 Camaro, and that's too expensive. The Cobalt SS, on the other hand, priced near the bottom of the Camaro price range, featuring the outstanding LNF engine with a boast-worthy 260 hp. It was a monster, and it had leather seats and summer tires all for less than a well-equipped Camaro LT. Start the next generation of drivers with an early interest in GM, and they'll mature into other GM vehicles as they age. If you let them buy a BRZ or Si or whatever other garbage they'll think is great (due only to marketing), then they'll age and return to the same dealer that sold it to them after dozens of oil changes and find themselves driving an import. We don't want that. You've got to get young people inspired by your brand. You can only do that with cars that are financially attainable. Everyone wants a Lamborghini at 16. No one expects one. The Camaro is out of reach. As a 27-year-old college graduate with a respectable career, I won't be able to afford one anytime soon due to the costs of college, and that's above average. I have friends with more than double my debt. For us, the cars we buy with our new jobs (my Ensignmobile, if you will) represent our earliest investments in something we treasure, and we're going to buy based on what we probably had as a first car. You're lucky I had a Cobalt coupe, or I might be one more member of another less refined community. Now go out and get more passionate enthusiasts by building and selling the best cars in every category. It's up to you to build a sport trim of an existing compact (Cruze SS) and maybe sub-compact (Sonic SS), and then it's further up to you to market them as fun to drive. Keep up the good work, and expand your horizons.

I am available for further discussion.