In even the worst press kits, there’s a treasure house of information to be gained about the exact
vehicle in question as well as the company that builds it. Sometimes, press kits will say more
accidentally about the company than they ever intended. This is a case. The Durango’s all-new interior is a surprise owners always deserved but never expected. This single sentence, an easy, inoffensive intro to the massive enhancements made to the Durango’s previously sub-par interior, was discovered 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 shoppers would be overcome by the quality and cost of the new Durango’s interior, it claims a lot
more than that. In fact , it pretty much sums up the previous couple of years of the Chrysler
enterprise. I propose the following interpretation :
Look, we both know that Dodge interiors have been rubbish for years now, and we both know you, the shopper, deserved better from a
mainstream automaker. But we at Dodge / Chrysler refused to / could not give it to you, and you’ve been
unhappy 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, as we eventually got the memorandum on client satisfaction. It sounds cynical, but the reality is colder and harder than a Caliber’s interior. There it is, in Dodge’s own press materials : a tacit admission the brand ( and company in total ) 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 infamous pizza purveyor lately 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 merited from here on out. Sound
familiar? Dodge, Dominoes, they even sound similar. Makes you ponder whether they hired the same PR consultant. Even if it was unintentional, could you blame Dodge for trying? Of course , Dominoes sales peaked after the new pizza and accompanying ad campaign launched. We, as consumers, are fed so much marketing nonsense in advertising nowadays that it’s essentially refreshing to hear a major firm admit their mistakes and speak simply about the grim reality of their products. Many food critics opined that the new Dominoes pizza was only slightly better than the old stuff, nevertheless it didn’t hurt sales. The humiliated ad s and guarantees of redemption made an impression on consumers.
of course, it’s an extremely enormous jump from a $10 pizza to a $30,000 SUV. Automobiles are the second biggest single-item buy a person or family makes after a house, and in this turbulent economic environment, no one wants to throw money away on a bad product. With so much money at stake, will they really be willing to chance it on company that has not posted a reasonable profit in years and had to be bailed out by the U.S. Executive twice? No one knows, but Dodge truly 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 on the changes especialy Honda Service Sherman. Most of them will not think highly of the old interior, and Dodge can’t hold it against them because 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 will not be kind to the old.
That leaves Chrysler with two options : pretend like the old product doesn’t exist, or embrace it. Detroit’s not unfamiliar
with the head-in-the-sand approach, but the new bosses appear to have woken their corporations up to the incontrovertible
fact that it wasn’t working. When it comes to cars, especially bad ones, patrons have a particularly long memory. They don’t forget simply because the automaker does not rap about it. And if you are Dodge, what do you have to lose? Any person turned off by this approach probably 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 actually believe in them. The Durango’s fraternal twin, the Jeep Grand Cherokee, saw a massive jump in sales and for good cause : it’s immensely better than the old one for Episcopal School of Dallas. Nobody enjoys swallowing their pride,
but it’s frequently forceful medication. At the end, the self-defacing
press campaign only works if the fresh product is essentially good, and in this example it is. Now,
Dodge and their Chrysler overlords just have to keep it up.
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