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Marketing
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Ad man goes too far in trying to sell the 1984 Corvette to its aging clientele
Greg was mostly impressed with prototypes of the 1984 Chevrolet Corvette he inspected while helping to prepare an advertising campaign. The all-new design was much roomier than the previous model. That wasn’t an accident. General […]
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Literature
If you ran VW in 1959 how would you prepare for Detroit’s compacts?
(UPDATED FROM 8/15/2014) Imagine that you run Volkswagen’s American operations in 1959. Detroit has finally woken up to the public’s growing interest in small cars. Studebaker and American Motors are already seeing dramatic sales increases after introducing compact […]
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What happened when a secretary secretly wrote a Jaguar XK-E ad
Back in the early-60s men mainly wrote ad copy. So when Joan Maisel landed a job at a major ad agency in New York City, she got stuck doing secretarial work even though she was […]
Quotes
Chevrolet Corvair advertising shows gender roles in 1960s
“Chevrolet marketers wanted to preserve ‘sportiness’ and ‘performance’ as masculine activities, but at the same time realized that women appreciated a good-handling car as much as their male counterparts. So, Chevrolet repurposed the performance attributes […]
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DeBest ad for the 1981 Pontiac Trans Am that was never printed
Pete DeBest thought he had it made. He followed his dad into the car business by landing a gig at Pontiac’s ad agency as a copy writer. Things went great at first. For example, one […]
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Readings
Richard Johnson showed what can happen when a journalist does auto history
(UPDATED FROM 2/19/2021) Histories written by practicing automotive journalists are usually engaging reads with lots of behind-the-scenes anecdotes. However, they can also be analytically superficial and grounded more in access than accountability journalism. In other […]
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