In even the worst press kits, there’s a treasure house of data to be gained about the particular
auto in query as well as the company that builds it. Sometimes, press kits will say more coincidentally about the company than they ever intended. This is just such a case. The Durango’s all-new interior is a surprise owners always merited but never expected. This single sentence, an easy, harmless intro to the big enhancements made to the Durango’s formerly sub-par interior, was found minding its own business on page twelve of Dodge’s 104-page novel that’s the 2011 Durango press kit. The writer’s goal, I might hope, was to proffer that customers would be overwhelmed by the quality and value of the new Durango’s interior, but it announces lots
more than that. In fact , it pretty much sums up the previous couple of years of the Chrysler
enterprise. I propose the following translation :
Look, we both know that Dodge interiors have been rubbish for years now, and we both know you, the buyer, deserved better from a conventional automaker. But we at Dodge / Chrysler refused to / couldn’t give it to you, and you’ve been unsatisfied by us for such a long time that you do not expect better anymore. Boy, will you be stunned when you
see the new Durango’s interior, because we finally got the memo on customer satisfaction. It sounds ruthless, but the truth is chillier and harder than a Caliber’s interior. There it is, in Dodge’s own press materials : an implicit admission that the brand ( and company as a whole ) has been under-delivering for a while now. But there’s also hope when trying to finish. Because let’s be honest, it worked well for Dominoes. As you will have heard, the famous pizza
provider recently launched a new, self-degrading ad campaign calling out its poor-quality pizza and
promising the customer that they’d get the better-tasting pizza they deserved from here on out. Sound all to
familiar? Dodge, Dominoes, they even sound similar. Makes you wonder if they hired the same PR expert. Even if it was unintended, could you blame Dodge for trying? Of course , Dominoes sales peaked after the new pizza and accompanying press campaign launched. We, as customers, are fed so much selling rubbish in advertising nowadays that it’s essentially refreshing to hear a major co. admit their mistakes and speak simply about the unvarnished reality of their products. Many food critics opined the new Dominoes pizza was only marginally better than the old stuff, but it failed to hurt sales. The humiliated ad verts and promises of redemption made an impression on clients.
of course, it’s a very , very gigantic jump from a $10 pizza to a $30,000 SUV. Automobiles are the second biggest single-item purchase a person or family makes after a house, and in this turbulent economic environment, no one wants to spend needlessly on a bad product. With so much money at stake, will they really be ready to chance it on company that has not posted a nice profit in years and had to be bailed out by the U.S. Executive twice? Nobody knows, but Dodge actually doesn’t have a choice here. Anybody who’s so much as seen footage of the old Durango’s interior and the new one will have an opinion about the changes especialy Toyota Services Ardmore. A lot of them won’t think highly of the old interior, and Dodge can’t hold it against them as it was really bad. Whether the people at Chrysler like it or not, comparisons will be drawn between their old products and new, and they won’t be kind to the old.
That leaves Chrysler with 2 options : pretend like the old product does not exist, or embrace it. Detroit’s no stranger to the head-in-the-sand approach, but the new bosses appear to have woken their companies up to the fact that it wasn’t working. When it comes to automobiles, particularly bad ones, purchasers have a very long memory. They do not forget just because the automaker does not talk about it. And if you are Dodge, what do you have to lose? Any person turned off by this approach likely wasn’t going to purchase a new Dodge anyway. Fact is, the new products are significantly better than the old ones, and the folks behind them truly believe strongly in them. The Durango’s fraternal twin, the Jeep Grand Cherokee, has seen agreat jump in sales and for good cause : it’s tremendously better than the old one for Episcopal School of Dallas. Nobody enjoys swallowing their pride,
but it is often strong medication. At the end, the self-defacing
press campaign only works if the fresh product is actually good, and in this example it is. Now,
Dodge and their Chrysler overlords just have to keep it up.
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