Yes, but it's a Gucci handbasket

[Fisher, Scott]

Ti Kan talks about:

>"brand names" were conjured up by marketeers, unlike the European makes
>whose names have a real company behind it, actually mean something, and
>has a rich heritage associated.

Unfortunately, Ti, you got me started... (please note it isn't you I'm
railing against, and please don't take it personally!  This is a rant, not a
flame! :-)

In a sort of psychological parallel to the contemporary inability to design
(or at least bring to market) any motor vehicle that doesn't shamelessly ape
the styling fads of long ago, there is an even more depressing and
infuriating trend -- unfortunately, one participated in by our own marque of
common interest, I am ashamed to say -- of exhuming the names of Grands
Marques long dead and tack-welding them onto objects of varied intrinsic
quality and appeal, but with absolutely ZERO connection to the heritage,
history and traditions they are attempting to appropriate.  The idea, it
appears, is to cash in on the heritage and meaning of some dead marque's
beloved memory, then use that to give panache to a product that would
otherwise have to succeed or fail on its own merits.  It makes me think of
one of those processions in rural Italy where once a year they haul out the
bones of the local saint and trot them around the village so that weeping
old ladies can kiss the rotting toes of the skeleton; or perhaps it's better
cast as a sort of automotive "Night of the Living Dead," where re-animated
corpses shamble across the countryside to eat the brains of the living.

If you can't compete on your own merits, it's the worst sort of bourgeois
fakery and hokum to pretend to be something you think is better (or more
pointedly, something you think your target market will think is better) in
the hopes of deceiving customers.  It may even be worse than changing the
name of your product line in midyear, in the hopes that buyers will either
remember great vehicles from the past ("Oooh, it's a 1750 Veloce") or forget
awful ones from the present ("it's a 100 -- no, it's a 5000 -- nope, now
it's a 100 again, dang!").  And if you CAN compete on your own merits and
you stoop to this bourgeois fakery and hokum, well, that's merely pathetic.

But of course, bourgeois fakery and hokum are almost always wildly
successful, because Phineas Taylor Barnum was, once again, absolutely
correct in his assessment of human credulity (though I think his formula
needs updating to take account of the modern birth rate).  It's the kind of
oily deception we expect from the U.S. automotive industry, and of course
one of countless things for which that industry has been roundly and justly
despised over the years.  But it's a sick, sad commentary to see it
happening in Europe as well.  I guess it's the cost of expanding market
share; there are, as always, tens of thousands more idiots than cognoscenti,
and the money of fools fattens the shareholders' coffers just as well as
that of those in the know.  It's not only the poor who are always with us,
it's also the fatuous, the ignorant, and the easily duped.  And now they can
afford new cars, slathered with Names their grandparents could only dream
of!  Truly, it is a worker's paradise.  Just don't eat your new and improved
chocolate ration all in one sitting.

But that doesn't make it right, morally or ethically or (more to the point)
intrinsically, to buy the rights to the name of someone who has shuffled off
this mortal coil and slap it on a design pressed by robots 30 or 40 or 50
years after the death of the eponymous artist (never mind that the robots
probably do a much better job of critical assembly than the laborers of the
Twenties and Thirties); it fails to honor the dead, any more than it would
to make him the main course at a ghoul's banquet.  And that, of course, is
the twist: in this automotive Night of the Living Dead, it's the living who
shamble about sucking the brains of the dead, desperate for some creative
flicker that will make their insipid mass-produced gewgaw a
putrefaction-encrusted hair more trendy than the one being slammed out in
the millions by the ghoul in the next seat.

I thought of another analogy recently, while listening to Franco Corelli's
performance of "Nessun dorma" and admiring the way the afternoon light
played over the last design penned by Battista "Pinin" Farina before his
death in the mid-1960s, so this analogy has a decided Italian flair to it.
(Some of you -- and you know who you are -- who may know me from Another
List Far Away can no doubt imagine the application of this analogy to a
certain Torinese automaker who has, since 1987, applied a well-known
modification of the Visconti crest to their "sporting" products.)

If you hire Andrea Bocelli to sing Smash Mouth's "Pet Names," translate the
lyrics to Italian, and stick a string orchestra behind him, it may sound
good.  It may receive critical acclaim.  It may find a market in today's
increasingly global consumer scene, selling particularly well to the target
market in the crucial 18-to-34 age groups across a wide socio-economic
spectrum, et cetera, et cetera.

But it ain't Puccini.

And if you CALL it Puccini, you're a liar, a fraud, and a weasel, because
Puccini's dead, bloody stone dead, and he will write no more forever.

Even if you buy the rights to the name from Puccini's heirs -- you're still
a liar, a fraud, and a weasel, you're just a liar, a fraud, and a weasel
with a huge pile of money.

Which is why my estimation for Ferdinand Piech -- whose pedigree (literally
as well as figuratively) in the world of motorsports is unimpeachable, and
whom I have described as the last living automaker with any real balls --
went down several notches when he commissioned Giorgio Giugiaro (an
automotive artist, a Name in his own right, and one with an established
history with VWAG) to design a very interesting vehicle with a very
interesting Audi-developed engine -- so far so good -- and then painted it
blue and named it after a dead automotive artist (whose factory made some of
the most magnificent automobiles ever conceived and executed).  I guess the
917, the ur-quattro, and two successive Le Mans victories aren't enough to
overshadow the names of his grandfather and uncle.  

Which, of course, were Ferdinand.

(So, audifans, a reader survey: Scott needs a) more b) less coffee... choose
one. :-)

--Scott Fisher
  Tualatin, Oregon