Often, you choose the car companies your parents praised, you enjoy the clothes you've enjoyed for years, and often you buy because of quality, not just quantity. So what do you do when you hear of other brands in trouble? That probably indicated to you that those brands are trouble.
When GM reported its dire standings and it's lookout for potential buyers, consumers avoided them like the plague. People stopped buying them, period. Some would ponder why this is.
My guess would be, poor numbers indicate a lack of buying interest for a few select reasons:
1) My first assumption would tell me that if consumers aren't buying a certain product, it's because it's not quality. Now, the exception would have to be Volvo under the umbrella of GM, but that could be because of a high Price Point in a market where it's hard to sell someone a pair of shoes.
2) I would then assume that people are buying for the long term. American cars have a reputation of not sustaining as well over time as Japanese and German cars, so this could be another avenue.
Either way, what kind of branding strategy would then have to follow all this bad luck to come out on top? Would superhuman brand positioning be the next avenue that you'd have pull off? Would re-positioning even work?
Who Knows?
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