Drive by Tim Falconer Page B

of the city. Originally from Vancouver, Johnson is a twenty-five-year GM veteran who, despite his training as a mechanical engineer, moved over to “the dark side” for the company in 1986 and is now Miami-based regional director of sales and marketing for Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. He brought along Diego Felices, GM’s marketing manager in Argentina, and we started off talking about what the car means to Argentines. Felices, a slight man with short reddish hair and a goatee, pointed out that it’s difficult to sell cars with automatic transmissions in Argentina, “because people here, they like driving.” Even in Buenos Aires, where many residents don’t need a car to get to work, they keep one just so they can go for a drive on weekends. “A car is status,” Felices assured me.“If you buy here in Argentina, you buy it for the style of the car, trying to show off what you have achieved. It’s definitely not an appliance.”
    Although Johnson had been in his new job for less than a year, he’d already noticed some significant differences between the two hemispheres. “You can be much more subtle here and therefore more creative,” said Johnson, who believes South America has some of the most creative art directors and copywriters. It’s not just the artistry of the ads that is different, though. “It’s a much more emotional message to consumers here. It doesn’t mean you don’t have rational messages too, but you can reach consumersbetter when you talk about things that matter to them, whether it’s family, friends or what the vehicle means to them in their life,” he explained. “In North America, the message to consumers has become much more rational, much more about features and benefits, and prices have become more competitive.”
    The appeal to the rational is in some ways a throwback to the ads of the 1920s and 1930s, when an automobile wasn’t a given for most people and didn’t yet possess the entrenched symbolism in the American psyche it does now, so companies spent more effort selling people on the idea of owning a car. Today, a car isn’t necessarily the status symbol it once was—and to some people it’s just a glorified appliance—so increasingly beleaguered American manufacturers plug benefits such as safety and fuel economy.
    Safety hasn’t always been the most effective theme to base advertising on (though it has been a consistent winner for Volvo). In Iacocca: An Autobiography , the one-time Ford executive admits that when the company pitched safety rather than performance in 1956, “the campaign was a bust.” He quickly came up with an alternative approach that promoted a financing deal, and sales took off. But that didn’t stop others from trying again. “With SUVs, you see a lot of print ads or TV ads with rainstorms and swerves and stuff like that to impart that sense of safety,” noted MacDonald. And GM has promoted the safety features of its OnStar system. In one radio ad, OnStar staff contacted emergency services for someone who has been in a collision; in another, the driver received a “check-in” call after an air bag had deployed. More controversially, children in a 2005 TV ad asked their parents a series of “Would you …?” questions such as, “Would you put my little brother in a car without a car seat?” ending with, “Would you drive me without OnStar?” Some people found these spots offensive because they seemed to suggest that people who didn’t pony up for the expensive service didn’t care about the safety of their family.
    Fuel economy also comes and goes as a selling feature. A print ad for the 1953 Chevrolet touted the car’s “sensational newgasoline economy” and opened with: “The smiling people in this picture have been traveling since early morning; and, much to