Where Detroit Went Wrong

Here is my theory. The Big Three stopped being customer focused businesses decades ago.

Every company has a personality, which most of us call the "culture" of that company. And in every company there is one business function that really controls the company. For example, finance, manufacturing, marketing could all be the function that calls the final shots. At P&G it is marketing, at Fed Ex it is operations, at Citi it is finance. Most times this is unwritten, but understood by all.

So much of a company's culture is determined by the dominant function within the company. At the automakers, finance and manufacturing long ago became the dominant functions and ultimately drove the products that the company made. How else do you explain the Pontiac Aztec?

With perhaps the exception of their pick up trucks, the Big Three have not built cars that people really want in many, many years. Their quality is apparently equal to the other car makers now. So why don't we want to buy American cars? Because they weren't designed and built based on what we want. They were designed and built based on what the company wanted to build, the need to feed their large manufacturing operation busy, the need to pay their long term obligations. And to be clear, the dealers are not end consumers and depending upon their opinions is better than nothing, but no substitute for meeting consumers needs.

To be fair, I think Ford is now taking much more of a consumer focus and their CMO Jim Farley is their best chance at bringing the consumer's voice into the design and engineering studios.

If the U.S. automakers were consumer focused and not internally focused, their brand strategy would have made a whole lot more sense. What role does Buick play in their product portfolio? Why do they make the exact same model under the GM label and Chevy label? We all know it is exactly the same car/truck. So what is the point?

In recent years, realizing their products weren't meeting broad swaths of the market, Detroit began buying foreign automakers like Volvo, Saab and Hummer. But look what GM did to Saab. They tried to standardize their engines and platforms. The designs became more vanilla and units sold have dropped by almost half since GM purchased them.

Jim Farley and his comrades are the key to the Big Three's survival, with or without a large bailout package.