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Our Two Cents: Why Automakers Kill Their Performance Brands
Performance brands create products we love to own, mostly because they are designed to outperform their competition. Who doesn’t want a piece of that winning formula?
Some folks do not, and they pull at the purse strings of the companies behind these products. Chevrolet had the Super Sport (SS) for a long time, but applying it to vehicles like the Chevrolet Malibu MAXX might not have been the smartest long-term move. Ford wavers in a similar manner, but to a worse extent: witness the life and death of Total Performance, Special Vehicle Operations, the Special Vehicle Team, and the seemingly torrid relationship they have with Shelby American, Inc.
But why does this happen? We asked the team here at Hagerty Media that very question, and our answers are quite telling.
Here’s A Meme For That
(You’re welcome.)—Matt Tuccillo
“Oh, dang.”—Sajeev Mehta
Marketplace
Buy and sell classics with confidence
“Exactly as above, though I’ll add some detail based on years of experience covering the industry: A new VP of product kicks down the door, desperate to prove he’s a gunslinger. He revives a performance nameplate to verify the brand’s bonafides, which have long been rendered dormant by sleepy products that sell well to retirees, real estate agents, and other people without a pulse.
Then they introduce ‘performance’ iterations that are the best they can do given a limited budget and mediocre base hardware, generate some buzz, and move on to next assignment. Then a successor comes with a mandate from the board to cut costs by slashing runaway product proliferation … especially the models that were supposed to be break-evens at unit 1000 and never even reached that.”—Aaron Robinson
They Are Afterthoughts
“I’m pretty ignorant on the inner workings of car brands and development, but to me it seems many performance sub-brands come as afterthoughts. They end up saddled with problems that wouldn’t exist if the performance aspect was taken into consideration from the outset of design, rather than the ‘just make it sportier later‘ school of thought.”—Kyle Smith
The Superhero Analogy
“Sub-brands launch for the same reason that superhero franchises peak and valley—you’ve got potentially valuable name equity and heritage that is worthless if left forever on the shelf. Investors are much more likely to take a shot in the dark with, say, The Flash, instead of trying to come up with a new concept that is almost guaranteed to fail. If it’s a success, then comes the ruthless milking of it until the quality goes down, the creative udders run dry, and everyone’s taste for the original thing has soured.
We’re on the cusp of this with Hyundai’s N brand, which was a brainchild of engineer/exec Albert Biermann, and was a rare case of something invented from whole cloth. But now that Biermann has departed the brand, the essence of the N brand (fun-to-drive, relatively affordable, durable for track use) is already being diluted as dealers stock more and more N-line styling packages for Hyundais.
Sub-brands need a constant, consistent feeding to keep them fresh and relevant. What not to do is what Cadillac did with V: Associate your racing team with a full-on BMW M competitor, only to turn the thing into a sub-brand with zero marketing support and introduce the Blackwing brand as a halo. Huh?”—Eric Weiner
They Are Just Props
“If you’re Chevrolet and Ford, you use (or use up) sub-brands to prop up your electric vehicles—like the Ford Mustang Mach-E, and the Chevrolet Blazer EV SS. Even Porsche has done it, with the Taycan Turbo S. Is anyone out there fooled? Anyone?”—Steven Cole Smith
The Legacy Outlives the Reality?
“I think I first heard the idea from a Volkswagen executive talking about the Golf GTI: Enthusiasts are the single best marketing apparatus a brand can have—and one the brand can never own.
Hearing from your friend that a certain badge on the hood is better than another is more convincing than any amount of marketing material on TV and the internet.
And how do you get enthusiasts to evangelize for your brand? Give them something to get excited about. Enter performance sub-brands. Usually laden with history written at a time when regulations and market forces were softer and more accepting of fringe ideas, these brands—SS, M, AMG, and the like—are full of genuinely remarkable machines that whipped us car nerds into frenzies way back when.
But when they reemerge, frankly, it just isn’t the same economy that they’re trying to sell into. Passionate fans don’t have buying power anymore, and the business case for a fringe idea usually blows up in the first board meeting. But, not one to pass up a good branding opportunity, the badges still get slapped on compromised machines of all sorts with the hopes that maybe we just won’t notice.”—Nathan Petroelje
Reincarnation Is a Good Thing?
“Too much of the auto industry lives in a cycle of reincarnation. Why invent when you can re-invent, or worse, reimagine? No one needed retro styled cars like the Ford GT, the 2002 Thunderbird, New Beetle, Mini, et al., with what amounts to a finite pool of buyers.
Some of those sold like hot cakes, sure, but that’s because consumers, like carmakers, which is to say ‘people,’ lack imagination. We would have done just fine if all the time and resources invested in re-hashed nostalgia were instead put into new concepts. But maybe that would have been too hard.”—Stefan Lombard
It’s YOUR Own Fault!
“I can say this as a Lincoln-Mercury enthusiast, as I have basically zero skin in this game. Also, you guys took all the good ones. So let’s do this thing:
The people who own performance-branded cars are usually the worst stewards of their respective brands. They won’t/can’t buy these vehicles when they are new, and generally go out of their way to avoid supporting the OEM behind the brand. Then they bag on the people who do splash the cash on the showroom floor, because said owners don’t treat the cars the way they’d expect. Finally, enough owners get caught on social media trashing the brand’s integrity to the point it remains a niche product with little hope of profitability once the platform is redesigned/replaced.
In order to sustain a brand, enthusiasts must spend their money with the manufacturer. Even if it’s just a performance branded logo on a T-shirt from an officially licensed vendor, because if enough people contribute to the cause, no amount of bad vibes can ruin the performance brand.
Case in point: premium brands like BMW M, any Ferrari, or anything with a Porsche emblem. Somehow those brands have found enough buyers and enough true believers to keep their performance intentions afloat through thick and thin.”—Sajeev Mehta
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Back in the 60’s the Mini Cooper was the rare performance version available on just one of the five body styles produced. Today all MINIs sold in North America are Coopers and the non Cooper MINI is the rare version sold in limited markets