The car Lee Iacocca will be remembered for, the 1965 Ford Mustang on the right.
Before I found out about Lee Iacoccaâs passing, on the same day I Tweeted about one of the cars he was behind when he was president of Ford: the 1975 US Granada. Basically, Iacocca understood that Americans wanted style. That really was at the core of his thinking. Itâs also why the Granadaâreally a warmed-over, restyled Falcon that had its roots in the late 1950sâwas always compared to Mercedes-Benz models. It was a mass-market American pastiche of the German car, with the same size. It had a grille and hood ornament. But it was frightfully slow, underpowered, and heavy, one of the most inefficient cars that Americans could buy.
Itâs the antithesis of the Mustang, which Iacocca arguably spearheaded, though in his autobiography, he noted that so many people claimed to be the father of the Mustang that he didnât want to be seen with the mother (or words to that effectâthe bookâs next to my partner whoâs already gone to sleep as I write).
That was a stylish car, too. It was a Falcon-based coupĂŠ. But it could be specified with the right power to match its looks, and it was priced and marketed brilliantly. Ford hit a home run, and Iacoccaâs reputation as a car industry guru was sealed.
He was also the man who came up with the idea for the Lincoln Continental Mark III. No, not the 1950s one (which technically wasn’t a Lincoln), the one that came out in the 1960s (Ford didnât really follow a sequential numbering systemâremember it went Mark, Mark II, III, IV, V, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII). The idea: stick a Rolls-Royce grille on a Thunderbird. It beat the Cadillac Eldorado, and Iacocca finished the â60s on a high.
I felt that history hadnât been kind to the Mustang II, which also came out under Iacoccaâs watch. The fact was it was a salesâ hit, at a time when Detroit was reeling from the 1973 fuel crisis. No V8s initially, which in the 21st century looks like a misstep; in 1974 it would have looked smart. Growing up, we didnât think the II was as bad as history remembers.
But the US range was, in some ways, lazy. GM was downsizing but Iacocca noted that people were still buying big cars. To give the impression of downsizing, Ford just renamed the Torino the LTD II. Look, itâs a smaller LTD! Not really: here was yet another car on old tech with another pastiche luxury-car grille.
When Iacocca was fired from Ford, he went to Chrysler, and pulled off his greatest salesâ job yet: to secure loan guarantees from the Carter administration and turn the company around with a range of modern, front-wheel-drive cars. The K-car, and its derivatives, were a demonstration of great platform-sharing. He noted in his autobiography that Chrysler even worked out a way to shave a tiny amount from the length to fit more Ks on a railroad car. And Iacoccaâs penchant for style re-emerged: not long after the original Plymouth Reliant and Dodge Aries, there were fancied up Chrysler LeBarons, and a woody wagon, then a convertible, the first factory US one since the 1976 Cadillac Eldorado. Most importantly, Chrysler got the T-115 minivans on sale before Renault got its Espace out, though after Nissan launched the first MPV, the smaller Prairie. Nevertheless, the minivan was an efficient family vehicle, and changed the face of motoring. Iacocca was right when he believed people want style, because itâs the SUV that has succeeded the MPV and minivan. SUVs are hardly efficient in most circumstances, but here we are in 2019, with minivan sales projected to fall, though Chrysler has managed to stay the market leader in its own country.
Chrysler paid back its loans years early, and it was under Iacocca that the company acquired American Motors Corp., getting the Jeep brand (the real prize) in the process. And itâs thanks to François Castaing and others who came across from AMC that Chrysler wound up with its LH sedans, the âcab-forwardâ models that proved to be one of the companyâs hits in the 1990s.
While having saved Chrysler, it was burdened with acquisitions, and in Iacoccaâs final full year as Chairman Lee, the company posted a $795 million loss, with the recession partly to blame. The press joked that LH stood for Last Hope.
Itâs an incredible record, with some amazing hits. They do outnumber the duds. But what really mars it is an incident of sexual harassment I learned some years ago that never appears in the official biographies. Now, I donât have a sworn affidavit, so you can treat this as hearsay. But until I heard that from a good friendâthe woman who was harassedâIacocca was a personal hero of mine. I bought the autobiography. I could forgive the financial disgrace Chrysler was in for 1991âone year out of nearly a dozen isnât a bad run, even though the writing was on the wall when so much money was spent on acquisitions, hurting working capital.
I know, his daughters and their kids wonât appreciate what I just said. That it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, especially when they can’t answer back. You could say that that was the era he was from, in an industry steeped in male privilegeâhis boss at Ford, Henry the second, was carrying on an affair behind his wifeâs back. You might say that one incident that I know of shouldnât mar this incredible business record. He has left his mark on history. Itâs just when it happens to one of your own friends that itâs closer to home, and itâs hard for me to offer the effortless praise I would normally have done if not for that knowledge.
I thought downgrading to an earlier Instagram would have solved the frame-rate problem, but I was wrong. Here are two videos using the same file. The first was uploaded using my new phone, but running v. 43 from April 2018, given that using the latest Instagram produced very stuttered video. However, it was the same story, so we can conclude there’s something wrong with using newer phones with Instagram. I’m not alone: others reported this bug earlier this year and the one solution appears to be upgrading the OS to Android 8. The conclusion I have to draw is that there is a fault with Android 7, or how Instagram works with Android 7.
The second was uploaded using my old phone, running probably the same version from April 2018, since that was the last time I performed an Instagram update. The frame rate is now normal.
The first took four attempts to upload. The second took nine attempts, meaning that I have uploaded this file 13 times on two phones, only to have Instagram show two. There is a problem with Instagram making videos publicly visible, a bug I first reported here earlier this year.
I’m going to have to pray my old phone holds up despite its damaged screen. Looks like all video uploads will have to be done using it, at least till Instagram fixes the frame-rate issue.
Failed uploads Above: Finally, the video uploaded after nine attempts on the old phone. One attempt never made it to the wall. Instagram refused to show eight of the uploads.
The Ford Focus Active: by the turn of the decade, this will be the only four-door passenger car Ford will sell in the US and Canada
In a surprise move, Ford has announced that it will cease selling passenger cars in the US and Canada by the early 2020s, excepting the Mustang and the Focus Active.
The announcement was actually for âNorth Americaâ but as Ford of MĂŠxico does a reasonable trade on Figos and Fiestas, itâs hard to see the policy be uniform right across the continent.
Itâs a cost-cutting exercise, designed to save $25,500 million in five years, and trucks and SUVs simply make more money for them. Small cars mean small profits. In fact, car sales lag those of the F-series, Escape and Explorer in the US. Shares have risen on the news.
That means Americans and Canadians will say goodbye to the Fiesta, Fusion (the four-door sedan counterpart to the Mondeo) and Taurus, the last of which is already superseded in China. If you liked the cooking RS and STs, then too bad. Lincolns are losing money for Ford, too, so maybe the Continental will vanishâgiven the Fusion is history, the MKZ will follow. That doesnât leave much in the Lincoln line-up.
My initial reaction was that the economies of scale would worsen: if youâre not developing for a global market, will development costs be successfully amortized in the same period? We have, however, seen the Japanese do reasonably well with products strictly for the North American market, e.g. certain Acuras and Hondas that are sold only in their neck of the woods. We also know most of the costs of the car are in the platform and architecture, and Ford has shown decent adaptability, particularly with the C519 Focus (the recently released Mk IV).
Ford says the cuts will come from sales and marketing, engineering and product development, as well as material costs, manufacturing and IT, in that order, according to Automotive News.
The fact that product development and engineering rank so highly there is worrying to me.
Theyâre bandying the word efficiency about a lot, and that always has me worried. Thatâs the word you used to hear from corporate raiders like Slater Walker. Things can look efficient while theyâre being weakened.
CEO Jim Hackett says heâs feeding the healthy parts of the business, âand deal decisively with the parts that destroy value.â
While itâs true that the crossover, SUV and truck markets are strong, as they are in many parts of the world, I canât help but think that Ford isnât preparing itself for tougher future scenarios.
Energy crises can come unpredictably, for one. Ford was late to the downsizing game in the 1970s because it saw the dollar signs with big cars. By 1977, GM had stolen a real march on Ford. By the turn of the decade, Chrysler was back from the brink with fuel-efficient cars while Ford sailed into the red.
Chrysler found itself too truck- and SUV-heavy with the recession of the late 2000s, and its entry-level nameplate Plymouth had already vanished, thanks to mismanagement by Daimler earlier in the century.
While thereâs not always a need for a full lineâAMC taught us that extending yourself too far isnât always wiseâI wonder if Ford is leaving itself vulnerable.
Crossovers like the Escape, which might outsell the Fusion, are being beaten in the market-place by the likes of the Toyota RAV4, so itâs not as though Ford is that strong in all the markets it wishes to remain in.
GM, having pulled out of Europe and Russia, might be in better shape because of its position in China. Ford trails GM when it comes to its Chinese footprint, although it will remain in Europe.
Fordâs Jim Farley says the company is looking at new types of vehicles that are spacious, versatile and economical, which hopefully will fill the gap should economic surprises surface. Because you need something cheap to hook buyers and get them to the brand. Thatâs not going to happen if Focus Active is the smallest car in the line-up.
Ford is likely to have these on global platforms. But that signals to me a real need to remain strong in R&D. Failing that, Ford is looking to partner up with someone, and it may already have an idea who that is.
I am speculating here, since I donât have any figures outlining what proportion of revenue is devoted to that area.
Nevertheless, this sounds like an appeasement of Wall Street.
That leaves one concern over nameplates. Ford has successfully introduced nameplates over the years because the product was right: Cortina, Mustang, Escort, Capri, Fiesta and Focus among them. But it has also failed by killing nameplates and replacing them with ones that had no real goodwill, such as Five Hundred and Freestyle.
Whatever Ford has in mind, I hope for their sake that the new product is compelling, as much as the Mustang and Fiesta were when they appeared on the market. Both emerged in the wake of economic recessions, with Ford innovating because it had to.
In this century, Alan Mulallyâs time at Ford had a measured, sensible approach, where you could understand the future. There are question marks over what Hackett has planned, and usually we have some clue what these new products will be four years out. All I know of is that the Ranger will make it to the US again, boosting truck sales, but thatâs hardly an innovation. Thatâs just filling a market niche with familiar product.
Will Ford do Brasil come up with something that can be sold in both North and South America? Perhaps the next-generation Ecosport?
There are lessons in history that shouldnât be ignored, and Ford has one of the most interesting pasts of any car maker. There is, however, a feeling from the announcement that this heralds a time of retrenchment, as its profits fall globally, and net income in the US rising for the first quarter in part due to a lower tax rate.
Remember, Isuzu also once thought it was a good idea to stop selling passenger cars and focus on SUVs and trucks. And theyâre no longer around in North America.
I don’t know if Instagram does this on all phones, but when I make multi-photo posts, it often leaves behind a very interesting image. Sometimes, the result is very artistic, such as this one of a LotusâFord Cortina Mk II.
You can see the rear three-quarter shot just peer in through the centre. I’ve a few others on my Tumblr, but this is the best one. Sometimes technology accidentally makes decent art. I’m still claiming copyright given it’s derived directly from my work.
Iâm fascinated by the 1970½ Ford Falcon for a number of reasons. The first is the obvious one: rarity. This car was built for only half a model year, from January to August 1970. If you think it looks like a contemporary Torino, youâre right: itâs basically a very stripped-down Torino. Yet you could spec it with any of the engines from the Torino, including the 429 inÂł V8 (and some did). Which brings me to the second reason: why would anyone really bother with it, if you could get a Torino for a bit more? (That answers why this car only lasted half a model year.) And that leads me to the third reason: what was going through Fordâs mind at the time? Thatâs where it gets interesting.
At this time, Ford was undergoing managerial changes, with Henry Ford II firing Bunkie Knudsen (who had been lured away from GM). That happened in September 1969, by which time the decision to go ahead with the Falcon had already been made. This is, in other words, a Knudsen initiative.
Federal regulations made the 1966â70 Falcon obsolete because it had a dash-mounted starterâthe rule was that they had to be in the column. However, itâs curious that Ford made this call to put the Falcon nameplate on a mid-sizer, considering it had made its name as an âeconomyâ car (by US standards). If you read the brochure, youâll find that this was all about size. Ford bragged that the car was 2 ft longer. Yet for this half-model year, it was still marketed as an âeconomyâ car.
I imagine as the US headed into the 1970s, there was no sign of the fuel crisis on the horizon, so there was nothing wrong about size. Why not spoil the average Falcon buyer, used to a smaller car, with something much larger? Hadnât upsizing already happened on every other model line out thereâby this point the Mustang was about to grow into a monstrosity with massive C-pillars and terrible rear visibility?
Ford (and the other Big Four makers) had been known to blow one model line up, then start another little one, and the Maverick had already been launched for 1970, and was now doing the compact work. By that logic, Falcon could grow more, even though other solutions might have been to either replace the Falcon with the Maverick or simply shift the Falcon nameplate to the Maverickâbut both would have involved âdownsizingâ, and in 1970 that was not in the US car industryâs vocab. The panic hadnât set in yet.
Fourthly, this is a beautiful shape. Unnecessarily big (till you consider it had to accommodate the 429), but a beautiful shape. The 1970s hadnât really started in earnest, so we hadnât seen some of the really garish shapes that were to come. This has that 1960s classicism coupled with 1970s uncertainty. Thereâs still some optimism with jet-age inspiration, but the lack of practicality foreshadowed the style-first, single-digit mpg âroad-hugging weightâ cars that were round the corner, cars which no one truly needed but Detroit, in its optimism (or blindness), believed Americans did. Thereâs still something very honest about the last US Falcon. After this, only the Australians and Argentinians kept things alive, but those are other stories.
Well done, Wikipedia, you got something right. It only took you 12 years. Nick, who appears to be a senior editor at the site, fixed up the complete fabrication that a user called ApolloBoy entered about the âFord CE14 platformâ in 2005, after I wrote a pretty scathing piece on Drivetribe about Wikipediaâs inadequacies, in part based on an earlier blog post I wrote here.
I am grateful to Nick who I expect saw my story.
However, errors still abound, and as I pointed out in Drivetribe, another user called Pmeisel, who appears to have been an automotive industry professional, said back in February 2005 there was a real confusion between development codes and platforms on Wikipedia.
While Nick has largely fixed the problemâhe has noted that it was the European Ford Escort of 1990 and its derivatives that CE14 should refer to, and not much earlier American carsâthere remains the lesser one that there is still no such thing as a âFord CE14 platformâ, just as there is no such thing as a âFord C170 platformâ, and so on.
Ford did not use these codes to refer to platforms, they used them to refer to specific models.
Letâs see if the Wikiality of this page will at least begin to disappear from the ânet, 12 years after ApolloBoy made up some crap and allowed it to propagate to the extent that some people regard it as fact.
I have enquired into Wikipedia from time to time, enough to know it is full of mistakes. But the errors do seem to happen far more often in the Anglophone one. Perhaps those of us who speak English are more willing to commit fictions to publication. Goodness knows we have seen an example in print, too. Does this culture lend us to being far less precise with a poorer concern for the truthâand does that in turn lead to the ease with which âfake newsâ winds up in our media?
I bought Steven Parissienâs The Life of the Automobile: a New History of the Motor Car, which started off as a good history. Iâm 300-odd pages in now and the mistakes are really worrying. Thereâs also a shocking lack of editing (one part repeated, albeit in different language, and spelling and grammatical mistakes) in the parts I’ve got to now; it’s as though the editor got tired after the first 10 chapters and stopped caring. But the biggest errors are factual.
I am astonished to learn, for instance, that Harley Earl was responsible for the concept of the Ford Thunderbird (p. 255), that Triumph TR7 production was transferred to Speke in 1982 (p. 293, though Parissien later contradicts himself with the correct fact), and that John Z. de Lorean was a protĂŠgĂŠ of Lee Iacocca (p. 309). I really have no idea how, but as far as I know, de Lorean was never at Ford, and he had a Chrysler stint long before Iacocca got there. I also never knew that âIn 1968 the Toyota Corolla became the first Japanese car to be manufactured in the USâ (p. 314; that was the year it went on sale there, and from memory the Corolla didn’t get built there till the NUMMI deal in the 1980s) or that the Opel Ascona C was also sold as the Opel Vectra (p. 337). The Italian Job was released in 1969, not 1967 (p. 224).
I am frustrated with this bookâand now it makes me wonder if the stuff earlier on, which I know less about, was accurate.
I can understand an editor not grasping the subject as well as the author but there is less excuse in professional publishing for the other problems. Maybe there are few professional proofreaders left, now that spellchecks have been around for a generation or more. I was prepared to recommend this book even a week ago and tolerated the spelling and grammar, but these factual mistakes are worse than what can be found in Wikipedia, and I often label parts of that site as fiction.
PS. (September 17): How much worse can it get, as I continued through? A lot.
On p. 320, we get an admission that Parissien was wrong on p. 314: the Honda Accord was the first Japanese-branded car to be made Stateside. At least an earlier error was corrected. But they begin again on p. 321: Parissien claims the V30 Toyota Camry dominated the US mid-size car market (it was never sold outside Japan; he’s thinking of the XV10, or the Japanese-market Scepter, which was badged Camry). Correcting his error on p. 322, the Camry was not specifically targeted at the US; it was Toyota’s attempt to create an efficient car from the ground up, and it was not done in 1980, but 1982 (the 1980 Celica Camry was not sold outside Japan). The Paykan deal was cemented long before George Turnbull got to Iran (p. 324), though local content rose in the 1970s for it to be truly Iranian-made and Parissien might mean the shifting of the engine tooling there, if I’m being generous. There is only one world, not multiple ones (also p. 324), unless Parissien knows something about parallel universes that the rest of us don’t. Surely Chrysler managed to launch its T-115 minivan (Dodge Caravan, Plymouth Voyager) before Renault launched the Espace (p. 330), and the Triumph Acclaim was never called the ‘Ronda’ (p. 334), though its successor was.
On p. 360, in a single paragraph, Parissien makes several errors. The MG 6 launched as a five-door car, not his claimed four. There is no such thing as the Roewe 150, in China or elsewhere. The MG 3 has five doors and is not a three-door counterpart to the 6. The five-door MG 6 launched not in 2011, but in 2010, and the Magnette name was only used in the UK for the four-door. The founder of Chrysler was Walter Chrysler, not Walther (p. 364). The Lancia Delta only became a Chrysler in the UK and Ăire, as far as I know (p. 365), and remained a Lancia in most countries. The Belgian designer is Dirk van Braeckel, not van Braeckl (p. 368); Mercedes-Benz never bought an 18¡53 per cent stake in Volkswagen (p. 369); and CitroĂŤn’s BX was not the last car in that range to have ‘pneumatic suspension’ (p. 372). The Malibu was not a Saturn, but a Chevrolet (p. 375), and Buick was never sold off (p. 376). The Ford Mondeo did not replace the Telstar in all Asian markets (p. 377), and it shared far more than the ‘windscreen, front doors and rear’ with the Contour and Mystique (in fact, the rear was not shared, though there were common engines, platform, and plenty more). It’s not entirely certain that the US market judged the Contour to be too small (p. 378), but there was a lack of marketing (which would have made an even better story than the one Parissien writes about). Ford subsequently filled the Contour’s niche with the smaller Focus Stateside. The CD338 Fusion was never sold in Australia (also p. 378). Ford never resurrected the Taunus in Germany under Alan Mulally (p. 381)âthis invention is incredible. VAZ did follow up the 2101 with something similar after it ended production in 1983 (not 1984, p. 382), viz. the 2105, which was about as similar as one could get to the 2101.
On p. 384, Parissien claims Acura’s Legend sales were ‘disappointing’, after saying they were ‘beginning to sell rather well’ 50 pp. before. The Hindustan Ambassador was not based on the 1954 Morris Oxford (p. 389): that car was actually the Hindusthan Landmaster. The Ambassador was based on the 1957 Morris Oxford III, and was in production from 1959, not 1958. The Red Flag (or Hongqi) marque was not reborn on an Audi A6 (p. 391), but the marque had been used on a version of the Audi 100 C3 from 1988, and no Hongqi bore an AudiâChryslerâHongqi brand name. The Chinese company is Dongfeng, not Dongfen (p. 391), and Parissien’s claim that the Everus was sold in the west (p. 392) is news to me, as I am sure it is to its own management. I’ll stop there for now.
P.PS. (September 18): Some bedtime reading, or should I say error-finding, last night. On p. 394, Toyota and Aston Martin did not jointly develop the Cygnet: Toyota developed the IQ in 2008, and Aston Martin converted that car to become its Cygnet, and ‘hot hatch’ is a very optimistic description for a city car. Toyota did not launch the Cygnet in 2008 as Parissien claims, nor did it have a say in what customers were expected to purchase the Cygnet: it was aimed specifically at existing Aston Martin owners, not ‘Toyota and Aston expected initial demand to be limited to those who already owned an Aston Martin sports car.’ It was certainly no ‘eccentric experiment’ of Toyota, but of Aston Martin. Volvo never made a model called the A40 (p. 395), and I bet Nissan is surprised to find that the original Qashqai was designed ‘at the firm’s Milan design centre’ (p. 397) when it was designed in London. Maserati never launched a Jeep-based SUV called the Kubang (p. 397), but it did have a concept of that name, and the Levante appeared in 2016 after the book was published. There is no such car as the Porsche Cajun, and if Parissien refers to the smaller Porsche crossover, then that is called the Macan, and it has five doors, not the claimed three (p. 397). The Volkswagen New Beetle was not on a Polo platform (p. 399), but a Golf one, as was its successor (though a newer Golf); and Ford would dispute that its Mustang is a sedan (p. 401). If J Mays’s first name is J (as footnoted), then there is no need to refer to him as ‘J. Mays’ (p. 401). The Ford Ka’s name is not derived from StreetKa (p. 402): that was a model spun off from the Ka in 2002; and some would regard the Mk II model was being superior to the Fiat 500 on which it is based (especially as Fiat adopted some of the changes for its own model). I have yet to see a Smart with a Mercedes-Benz three-pointed star or marque anywhere, unlike Parissien who seems to think they are badged Mercedes (p. 403), and a Smart SUV does not exist unless Parissien is reporting again from his parallel universe (p. 403). There is also no such car as the Kia Exclusive (p. 410).
How interesting to see a silly Tweet of mine make the Murdoch Press and lead an opinion columnâIâm told it even hit the news.com.au home page.
Itâs a very old joke that Iâve told since 2002, when I walked along Bay Road in Kilbirnie and saw a locksmith sign in Futura. Back then, Dick Smith Electronics had its logotype set in ITC Avant Garde Gothic. I really thought it was a Dick Smith sign at a first, fleeting glance, seeing CKSMITH. The joke was born.
Most in my social media streams got it except a couple of Australians who had likely come across it via Murdochs a day late, one calling me ignorant (not sure how you can get that from one Tweet), and another âaholeâ (is this a misspelling of aloha?). As the funniest guy in their media is John Clarke, who was born in New Zealand, maybe humour doesnât reach a couple of households there if it has to be imported. And the number of times Johnâs taken the piss about us, to my thorough enjoyment, means that some of us can take a joke. Perhaps we just have a sense of humour. We have to: it was the only way we could deal with our PM appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman. It is, to quote the man, âa bit of banter. No drama.â
The false indignation âon behalf of othersâ is always a comical one, because itâs usually founded on a misplaced and unjustified sense of superiority. During a political campaign, theyâre the ones I find the most humorous and least authoritative. Thick skin came with that territory.
Neither deserves a response beyond what I said on Twitter, but the second one (with a fresh new account to troll from, always a good sign of someone who wonât stand by their words) highlights a point that I have made on this blog before. âRuby Pondâ notes, âThe guy is pure Oz and started when you were in nappies and tried! Stick to your foreign companies, they really help Oz.â Iâm not sure what I was tried about, not having been to court while I was in nappies, but maybe sheâs depending on the fact that not everyone remembers back to their infancy.
Well done. She got this from an American-owned newspaper website (remember, Rupertâs no longer an Australian, nor is the HQ in Australia and hasnât been for a long, long time), and, for the record, Iâm not as old as the business that Dick founded. Thereâs also a suggestion that I must be Australian, because, after all, everyone on the planet must be. No other countries exist. I didnât want to get into trans-Tasman rivalry in such a situation, nor was it appropriate to give a list of Australian corporate misdeeds in New Zealand. The term off-topic springs to mind.
I told her, âStick to your foreign media, they really help Oz.â
Hers is that simplistic thinking that gets people supporting foreign-owned businesses when they believe they are supporting local ones.
Dickâs been one of my personal heroes since his solo helicopter flight and Iâve been a customer of the chain he founded since I was old enough to buy my own tech gear. Entrepreneurs like him are the ones Iâve always encouraged, through mentoring and through my policies. However, the sad story of the company, no longer owned by Dick, is one of corporate greedâwhich the founder himself has been critical of. We havenât learned the lessons of so many economic crises: Gordon Geckoâs mantra of âgreed is goodâ continues to drive the corporate world.
The reason so many multinationals buy local brands is to fool the public into thinking theyâre supporting their own. Weâre guilty of it ourselves, and I recall using the examples of Just Juice and most of our local newspapers on this blog. People closed accounts at the National Bank when it became ANZ here, because of a suspicion of, dislike of, or rivalry with Australia, perceiving National to be a local bank. The problem there: ANZ had owned the National Bank for years before the rebranding of its own subsidiary, and prior to that it was part of Lloyds TSB in the UK. A lot of Australians think Ford and Holden are domestic players (though, oddly, not Toyota, which probably builds as many, if not more, cars there), just as many Britons still think they are buying British when they shop at Ford and Vauxhall.
The situation with news.com.au differs slightly in that that business was started in Australia by Rupert Murdochâs Dad, and it has grown from thereâbut the fact remains that its HQ is overseas and thatâs where it pays its tax. Help to Australians: not a lot. The Murdoch Pressâs globalization agenda wonât be one that the âbuy Australianâ crowd would support for the most part.
But this is how brands work, because they encourage us to make mental shortcuts for the products and services we consume. Iâve devoted a good deal of my professional life to it. Some should encourage scrutiny because of the power they have (Wally Olins noted, many years ago, how some brands need to adopt notions that were once reserved for states), and it was hoped that, post-No Logo, we would be more inquisitive about the backgrounds to the organizations we support.
Even though it’s our money and time, the sad thing is that this level of inquiry remains the province of the few, those people who are willing to scrutinize their own behaviour and practise what they preach. Social media have helped spread news of corporate misbehaviours (Volkswagen will attest to that) and more people are aware; but to counter that we get more information than we ever used to, and unless something resonates, will we just forget it?
Therefore, it can only be something where people who have done the proper investigation get to have a say. And like all human endeavours, it can be scammed, so safeguards have to be built in.
One of the reasons the Medinge Group awarded its Brands with a Conscience accolades for close to a decade was to champion the organizations that were getting it right, inviting transparency and scrutiny, championing good corporate citizenship, and engaging in socially responsible programmes. Among them were companies devoted to doing things right by the communities they were present in, whether it was Dilmah Tea, Tata Steel or Hennes & Mauritz.
By our championing them, selected by a think-tank of leading brand professionals, we would be able to highlight shining examples of branding, as well as give them the sort of boost they deserved. If positive companies could increase their custom, and if positive non-profits could increase their influence, then we can do some good in the world.
As people rightly want shortcuts in their busy daily lives, then the work at Medinge, if seen as an endorsement, would help them make a decision about whether to deal with that organization or not.
Itâs nice to be in that bubble, which makes me ever-grateful to get reminders that we still have a lot of work to do. If youâre genuinely desirous of helping your own, then we need to help create more ways of reminding people which organizations do just that. The Brands with a Conscience programme was definitely a very good way of doing it. What shall we do, in the post-peak-Facebook world of the second part of this decade, to get word out? Is it through video, thanks to greater bandwidth, that allows us to experience and understand more? Is this the coming of age of some form of virtual reality? Or, as we did when we first started exploring bulletin boards and email, time again for us to reach out to people in communities very foreign and different to ours through video chatsâsomething like Google Hangouts but actually with people? (Yes, I know, Google fans, I was taking the piss.) Is Skype the service on which this can be built?
I would have said that technology is the great democratizer, and maybe more of us should be giving out awards to truly deserving organizations, voted on by more of the public. But we come across the issue of quality versus quantity again: the Reputation Institute surveyed 60,000 people in 15 countries and still wound up with NestlĂŠ among the most reputable firms in the world. NestlĂŠ may do very good things in some quarters, but it hasnât been able to avoid a lawsuit by environmental and public interests groups in California over its water-bottling operation there, or accusations by activists who believe the company wants to privatize water at the expense of public health. Volkswagen was there in the 2014 survey. We decide on image, and that image is the very thing that gets us making bad choices.
The next innovators are already on to it, and we donât even know that we seek it. But, in order to self-actualize, maybe organizing usâindividuals, not corporationsâinto global communities is the next stage. We have seen Kiva work so positively, so how about making it more interactive? Naturally we will tend to choose to help those in our own countries firstâcrowdfunding campaigns show us thatâbut allowing us to understand another human beingâs situation could be the challenge in a time when governments pursue their austerity agenda. Somehow, we can restore, at least to some degree, the optimism we had when we in the first world accessed the World Wide Web for the first time.
With Google and Ford announcing they will team up to make self-driving cars, I have some concerns.
Iâm not in Luddite position on the idea of self-driving cars. Potentially, they can be far safer than what we have today. I see so many godawful drivers out thereâNew Zealand has a very high road toll based on our small population, and itâs not hard to see whyâand the self-driving car canât be a bad thing. Active safety, active cruise control, and other features all point to be a better future on our roads.
However, is Google the right firm? You donât need to look too far (especially on this blog) to find some Google misdeed, a company that happily does dodgy things till it gets busted.
Imagine the future.
⢠The car has no brakes until you sign up to Google Plus, then log in.
⢠You cannot enter the car till you load a Google Play app on to your phone. You have to agree to a bunch of settings which you don’t even read, but essentially you’ve let them monitor you.
⢠If you have a car accident in a Google car, thereâs no phone number for anyone to call. You have to sign up to the support forums where youâre told by Google volunteers that itâs your fault for misusing the software. Or they just ignore you. You spend several years trying to get your case heard.
⢠Google listens to all your in-car conversations so it can deliver targeted advertising to you, until you opt out of this feature in your Google Account settings.
⢠Google hacks your devices while you are near the car, even if you have Do Not Track or other privacy settings turned on. They continue doing this till the Murdoch Press writes an article about it or they get reported to an industry association.
⢠Doubleclick targeted advertising appears in the carâs central LCD screen.
⢠All routes that the Google cars choose go past advertisers’ brick-and-mortar stores.
⢠Google Street View is updated a lot more, which sounds great, till you realize it’s been updated with images from your latest journey.
⢠Unless you opt out, Google actually drives you to the store which has the goods you mentioned in a private Gmail message, even though you don’t need the product and it just came up casually in conversation.
⢠When US state attorneys-general sue Google over wasted time with the cars driving you to these stores, the penalty is roughly four hours of the companyâs earnings.
Autonomous cars are part of our future. But I’ll opt for the tech of a firm I trust more, thank you. And right now, I even trust Volkswagen more than Google.
Star Wars is in my feed in a big way. To get up to speed on the film series, I had to start with the memorable theme by John Williams.
Thanks, Bill and Paul.
And who better to describe the plot than someone else in the science-fiction world, Doctor Who?
Seriously though, I hope all friends who are big Star Wars fans enjoy Episode VII. It seems to be getting positive reviews, partly because it appeals to our sense of nostalgia. It hasn’t blown anyone away in the same manner as the 1977 original, but then Disney would be very foolhardy to stray for this sequel. If you are building a brand that was at its height 30 years ago, nostalgia isn’t a bad toolâjust ask the team that came up with the 1994 Ford Mustang. J. J. Abramsâthe creator of Felicity and What about Brian?, plus some other thingsâhas apparently been a genius at getting just enough from the past.
One item that is from Star Warsâ past is the opening title, or the crawl. I’ll be interested to learn if they’ve managed to re-create the typography of the original: they were unable to provide perfect matches for Episodes I through III because of the changes in technology and cuts of the typefaces that made it into the digital era. The main News Gothic type is far heavier in these later films. ITC Franklin Gothic was used for ‘A long time ago ⌒ for I to III; this, too, was originally News Gothic, but re-releases have brought all six films into line to use the later graphic.
However, it could be argued that even between Episodes V and VI there were changes: News Gothic Extra Condensed in caps for the subtitle for The Empire Strikes Back, switching to Univers for Return of the Jedi. (It seems even the most highly ranked fan wiki missed this.) And, of course, there was no equivalent in the original Star Warsâ’A New Hope’ was added in 1981.
Here’s how it looked in 1977:
And if you really wish to compare them, here are all six overlaid on each other:
I wasn’t a huge fan in the 1970s: sci-fi was not my thing, and I only saw Star Wars for the first time in the 1980s on video cassette, but I did have a maths set, complete with Artoo Detoo eraser (I learned my multiplication table from a Star Wars-themed sheet) and the Return of the Jedi book of the film. But even for this casual viewer and appreciator, enough of that opening sunk in for me to know that things weren’t quite right for The Phantom Menace in 1999. I hope, for those typographically observant fans, that The Force Awakens gets things back on track.
