Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 8, 1990 TAG: 9003081529
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: C6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFFRY SCOTT COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Together with the Chevrolet Vega and the Ford Pinto, the American Motors Gremlin completed a kind of incantation - "Vega, Pinto, Gremlin" - that cast a curse on the American automotive industry.
The taint of these shoddily made subcompacts - rushed to market in the 1970s to answer the fuel crisis and the influx of Japanese cars - was such that it stained the image of almost every American product. The "Made In America" label, in some quarters, came to mean what "Made In Japan" meant in the 1950s: slapdash, self-destructing goods.
These days, American quality is on the comeback. But it's a revival that has marketers divided. When do you tout "American Made," and when do you boast - as in a new Volkswagen ad campaign - that your automobile has the quality of "fahrvergnugen"?
It depends on your audience, say marketers.
According to SRI International, a Menlo Park, Calif., research firm, about 45 percent of Americans buy American out of patriotism. Quality is a secondary consideration.
SRI says there are four groups likely to buy products made in America, whether they're made well or made poorly. They are Belongers, Believers, Makers and Strivers. Those groups, says SRI, tend to be older, more conservative and more patriotic.
Wal-Mart was one of the first major marketers to shift its entire emphasis to "Buy American" when the everyday-low-price retailer launched its campaign five years ago. The chain recently updated the campaign to "Bring It Home To The USA."
"It's a business philosophy to strengthen the free-enterprise system," said a Wal-Mart spokesman of the campaign the company claims has boosted sales and "created or retained" more than 41,000 jobs in America since its inception. The core of the campaign is Wal-Mart's insistence on selling only American-made products "when there's an American-made option" for a price comparable with imported products.
Such mass-market patriotism - the textile industry's "Made In The USA" campaign is another successful example - appears to be reaching a growing audience, according to several market surveys. Cambridge Reports, a research company based in Cambridge, Mass., said the number of Americans who say they refuse to buy products because they're foreign-made has risen from 21 percent in 1985 to 39 percent in 1989.
At the same time, the majority of American consumers say they believe the quality of American-made goods generally has improved in recent years. According to a study last fall by the New York research firm Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, 52 percent of Americans today believe the quality of U.S.-made goods has improved in the past five years, while 30 percent said quality remained the same and 15 percent said it declined.
But for marketers of high-end products, patriotism ends where product glitz begins. And the majority of Americans still believe foreign-made automobiles are better made than American cars - by a margin of 52 percent to 44 percent, according to Yankelovich.
Those figures have emboldened Japanese carmakers to start sprinkling ads with Japanese words - like Mazda's "kansei engineering" - and Oriental imagery. Recent Infiniti ads recall the mood of the flashbacks from the old Kung Fu television series.
In February, Volkswagen started speaking German. New advertising features the freshly minted mouthful, "Fahrvergnugen," which the company says roughly translates into "a pleasure to drive."
Ron Dusenberry, manager of advertising for Volkswagen USA, says the ads - which the company is spending $140 million to air this year - aren't really meant to capitalize on German autos' superior image as much as to give Volkswagen "personality."
Still, admits Dusenberry, the ads are intended to change the agenda from price to quality. "Instead of saying `How low can you go?' in our advertising, we want to get back to the value of the car itself."
by CNB