DETROIT In new ads, GM admits cars had problems

The company is targeting people who buy only Asian vehicles.
DETROIT FREE PRESS
DETROIT -- General Motors Corp. will launch a nationwide ad campaign next week to admit something many consumers already knew: GM made some poor vehicles in the 1980s and 1990s.
Admitting its past blunders in the newspaper and magazine campaign is an unorthodox attempt by GM to attract the roughly 40 percent of auto buyers it says won't even consider GM products.
Ads will begin running next week in USA Today, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other national and regional publications. TV ads may follow.
In part, GM is trying to polish an image tarnished by low-quality cars such as the Chevrolet Chevette and Citation. Many GM cars of the 1980s and 1990s were notorious for oil leaks and premature paint flaking -- the kind of niggling defects that can aggravate consumers. GM has received a boost in recent years due to gains in vehicle-quality studies.
The campaign, which GM calls "The Road to Redemption," will be about "5 percent mea culpa and 95 percent what's good about GM," said John Middlebrook, GM vice president of brand marketing, in a press conference Wednesday.
"We were looking for something jarring, and the most jarring thing was the hard truth," said Dave Moore, chief creative officer at McCann-Erickson Detroit, the local ad firm that created the campaign. "Saying that '20 years ago we had some really bad products, but we've learned our lesson' is a pretty unconventional thing to admit in an ad."
Power report
GM has narrowed the gap between it and Toyota Motor Corp. -- the company recognized as best in initial vehicle quality by J.D. Power & amp; Associates -- by 58 percent in the past four years. The study measures quality problems in the first three months a vehicle is owned.
In J.D. Power's 2003 study, released this month, GM again topped its domestic rivals, recording an average of 134 problems per 100 vehicles -- one more than the industry average. Toyota repeated as the automaker with the highest overall initial quality, recording an average of 115 problems per 100 vehicles.
GM has, however, continued to lag further behind the industry in J.D. Power's long-term vehicle durability studies.
"That's a real advantage for Toyota and Honda, and you could argue is the most important thing when a person is deciding what to buy next," said Joe Ivers, partner at J.D. Power. "How the product does in year three, four or five is a big deal to the car buyer, and GM has had a harder time there."
Attracting buyers
A J.D. Power study showed in 2002 about 200,000 vehicle buyers left GM for Japanese-made vehicles, while only 75,000 switched to GM from its foreign counterparts.
Nonetheless, the GM ad campaign will try to attract buyers of rivals' cars and trucks by highlighting GM gains in initial quality studies, said Gary Cowger, GM president of North America.
"We may not have done everything right in the past, but we've learned from it," Cowger said. "It's a corporatewide communication effort to close the gap between perception and reality."
He said two factors -- GM's past reputation for poor quality and family traditions of driving only an Asian or European vehicle -- keep four out of 10 new vehicle buyers away from even considering GM.