Arthur Daley, Opel’s last New Zealand spokesman: âNever mind the Capri, Tel: I sell Opels now.â
In the Fairfax Press, General Motors has apparently confirmed it will bring in Opel-branded cars to sell alongside Holden-branded ones.
It’s an obvious move. For years, a good part of Holden’s range was Opel-designed. Like Vauxhall, the model name was the same as the Opels on the Continent, but with Holden in front, with the exception of the Opel Corsa (called Holden Barina).
In fact, New Zealand fielded the Holden Vectra before Australia introduced this model with the B series. The two markets have often differedâthose old enough might remember the Holden-badged version of the Isuzu Aska, assembled locally as the Camira in favour of the Australian model.
Australia, which I believe still has tariffs on motor cars, found the Opel-made product increasingly expensive, especially against Hyundai, which has carved huge inroads into the market. In the mid-2000s, the Opels began disappearing in favour of Daewoos. The Opel Corsa C gave way to the inferior Daewoo Kalos. The Opel Vectra C, never facelifted, gave way to the Daewoo Tosca. The Daewoo Lacetti was inserted below the Opel Astra G and H, though the latest Lacetti PremiĂšre, badged Holden Cruze, has supplanted both the former Lacetti and the Astra.
In other words, Holden’s product was outclassed at every level by its principal rival Fordâcertainly on this side of the Tasman, where CD-segment vehicles sell particularly well. Maybe Holden had Ford licked on price, but in terms of brand equity, it was falling fast. Perceived quality? Forget it. Brand loyalty? Don’t think it’s going to happen. There is very little that’s desirable about a Daewoo, though I admit to appreciating the Winstorm SUV’s styling. The car as a commodity? That’ll be the Daewoo.
The Astra still has a lot of fans in Australia, so the plan is to bring in that model at leastâand as affordable, European cars, positioning roughly where Volkswagen is. Corsa, Insignia and others will come in as well, with both a new dealer network and some Holden dealers.
The analysts have found that in Europe, Chevrolet (Eurospeak for Daewoo) has not cannibalized Opel sales. No surprises there. Take me: an Opel customer. I wrote to Holden some years ago, when they threatened to bring in the Daewoo Tosca, that there was no way in heck I would get one of their cars. I’m willing to bet that I wasn’t alone in feeling that way, and the fact the Tosca looks like a Seoul taxicab helps my argument.
Why not, I said, bring in Opels and pursue a unique model strategy, as GMNZ did in the 1980s and 1990s?
The question now is price. Opels were sold here in the 1980s at a premium and found few customers. It was only with the 1989 introduction of the Vectra A, at a reasonable price, that GM began clawing back market share in that segment. New Zealanders didn’t seem to mind whether the car was branded Opel or Holden, but when it did become a Holden in 1994, it made marketing a great deal easier.
Fairfax hints that Opels will carry a premium in Australia. But it rightly points out that Ford has European-sourced models that are competitive. However, I can make one thing very clear for New Zealand: if GM decides to reintroduce Opel into this market, where there are no tariffs on cars, it’ll have to be positioned against a lot of the competition from Ford. I have a feeling most Kiwis know they are buying German engineering when they head to the blue oval, with the exception of the Falcon, and Ford’s marketing has said as much.
We’ve had a different history from the Australians, and the brand has different connotations. It’s certainly not premium, and there’s very little reason for it to be. Ford might have had Dennis Waterman as Terry McCann singing the Minder “feem toon” do a dealer ad here in New Zealand, but, remember, GM had George Cole, as Arthur Daley, sell the Opel.
George Cole is not premium.
Mainstream European brands have failed time and again with premium pricing here. Peugeot lost sales when it began having ideas above its station. Renault has consistently got its pricing wrong and missed plenty of opportunities.
I have a feeling some of this is due to New Zealanders being world travellers. In a small country, we have to look outward. And that brings us exposure to international brands very readily.
We’ve also had plenty of used Japanese importsâincluding ex-Japan Opel Astra Gs.
It may account for why we don’t fall for the fake snobbery that automakers have tried to slap us with for many years. We seem to adopt best practice on so many things because I believe we’re an accepting people.
Transparency will be the order of the day. GM can’t afford to have Kiwis reject a brand for having ideas above its station should it go ahead with a similar effort over here. It has to balance (our relatively small) volume carefully with cannibalization. It has to consider whether it would like to have Holden’s brand equity continue to dip.
Mind you, we could have avoided all this if in 1992 GM did what I suggested then: badge the whole lot as Opel.* It would have ruined the blokeyness of the Holden brand, but it would have had products that appealed to buyers of B-, C- and CD-segment cars. In 1992, a big Opel Commodore, VP series, wouldn’t have been too bad, would it? And we’d have hopefully avoided this Daewoo experiment that has made ‘Australia’s own’ synonymous with ‘Made in Korea’.
* I know, with hindsight, this would have been a rotten idea, especially with New Zealanders embracing the VT Commodore in 1997. It’s hard to imagine that model having greater success here with a non-Holden badge.âJY
For the majority of the years that weâve been on the web (coming up to 20 years), we’ve maintained a links’ directory. It was disappointing, sometimes, to note that those whom we exchanged links with at the dawn of the web no longer link back. We’ve kept our outward links largely the way they were, updating them whenever we’re alerted to a site moving.
However, some people may have been scared off linking by none other than Google, and I can’t blame them. Its policy:
Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.
I also can’t blame Google for having such a policy because, in the last half-decade or so, there have been many automated requests for link exchanges. I remember spending a good part of one Saturday 12 years ago just sending, manually, requests for link exchanges, so I balk at these automated ones. Back in the 1990s, reciprocal linking was de rigueur. If they are penalizing automated link pages, then good for them.
It’s very easy to misinterpret the policy if you’re reading very quickly. Google doesn’t say that linking is badâafter all, its logarithm is in part built on how many people link to your siteâbut that excessive linking without regard to quality is bad.
My issue is trust: can I trust Google to determine whether the links’ pages we have, which date back to the 1990s, are not of the automated variety? (I couldn’t trust them to determine whether a blog was a splog, and I couldn’t trust them on certain privacy matters, so the Google brand has been tarnished badly in my book.) How many links are considered ‘excessive’, because if you’ve been building a section of your favourite ones, it’s bound to grow? (There’s some site out there called Yahoo! that started this way; maybe Google has heard of it.) Is a link exchange ‘scheme’ one of those automated ones that I, too, hate, or is a weekend of finding compatible sites and requesting link exchanges considered bad? I’ve certainly built ‘partner pages’, long before there was such a thing as Google, with the links hand-selected for relevance.
Of course, Google provides a solution to all of this: if you want to link to someone, join ‘the buzzing blogger community’. Call me cynical, but I wonder why it’s used the word blogger, even though it’s lowercase, and not blog or blogging. Sometimes, I just want to put up a link with a one-sentence descriptionâand a blog post is not the way to go for that, with a massive headline and a bit too much spectacle.
Like many things at Google, where the lines lie are shrouded in a bit of mystery. On transparency, it does well on some matters, but othersâwhere it can be scammedâit plays its cards close to its chest. Speaking for myself, I like links’ pagesâat least the ones that are manually done, endorsing sites where you’ve had a good relationship or dialogue with their webmasters. Dialogue is a good thing. And sometimes you get this dialogue from companies that are very unrelated to your own and you want to give them props.
It’d be a pity if some links’ pages had a negative effect on their parent sites, just because the Googlebot has made yet another random, wrongful decision that can’t be appealed. But I’m not about to give up our links’ pagesâwe’ve put sweat into those and we still want to endorse so many of those people.
There are probably two things, chiefly, that fuel support for Julian Assange.
First, the idea that the mainstream media are not independent, but merely mouthpieces for the establishment. There’s some truth to this.
Secondly, the fact that Wikileaks is revealing, this time, things that we already knew: that governments are two-faced.
While I have posted my reservations about Wikileaks elsewhere, the latest newsâthat the US and Red China collaborated on ensuring that COP15 would failâshows that governments are quite happy to follow the money, and be complicit with corporations who wish to continue polluting.
Creating transparencyâsomething I harped on about since joining the Medinge Group and writing in Beyond Branding with my colleaguesâis something I believe in, so knocking down a few walls and having certain suspicions confirmed are good things.
In the 2000s, the processes in our systems revealed that the Emperor had no clothes over at Enronâwhich prompted, in some respects, Beyond Brandingâand, more recently, that the sub-prime mortgage market was a crock.
Maybe it is about time that the processes revealed a few truths about government, and the very reasons so many of us mistrust them, or give politicians such a low rating in surveys.
The fact that despite the democratic ideal, many are not working for us.
On the 8th, Stefan Engeseth cheekily suggested on his blog that Wikileaks should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Yesterday, Russia suggested that Julian Assange could receive its nomination.
Although Russia itself has come under fire, it rather likes having the two-faced nature of NATO confirmed by Wikileaks: on the one hand, saying that Russia is a strategic partner, while on the other, planning to defend the Baltic states and Poland from a Russian attack.
A Peace Prize for a website or a founder who put certain anti-Taliban informants at risk would not get my vote, but the underlying sentiment of no more secrets does.
The sad thing is that it might not, single-handedly, usher in an era where governments level with us moreâbut it is one of many moves that might.
I say this as the establishment, including financial institutions, closes in on the website. As pointed out to me by Daniel Spector, PayPal and Mastercard are quite happy to accept your donations to the Ku Klux Klan, but will decline those to Wikileaks.
I still have Adam Curtisâs The Mayfair Set, a TV series charting the decline of British power and the rise of the technocracy, recorded on video cassette somewhere. I consider him someone who can see through the emperor having no clothes, and in The Mayfair Set, he certainly saw through the Empire having no clothes.
As I type this, John Barryâs âVendettaâ is going through my head as an earworm: the series used this piece as its theme tune.
On my friend Keith Adamsâs Facebook page was a link to Curtisâs blog at the BBC website, titled with a reference to another song, this time from Maurice Jarreâs Doctor Zhivago score. Curtis begins by saying that he uncovered a 1977 film about two British Leyland workers heading to Togliattigrad, where the ĐОгŃлО (Zhiguli, or Lada to those of us outside the Soviet Bloc) was built. At Togliattigrad, the managers used the chaos that was allowed to prevail to set up their alternative economic structures to line their own pocketsâand corruption was rife.
He writes, âWhat then happened is murky, but it is alleged that the managers in effect looted their own factory.â
So far, so good. It read as a story about the bad old days of communismâtill Curtis draws the clear parallels between Togliattigrad and what happened in the last days of the remnants of British Leyland. The Phoenix Four used money meant for the plant for themselves.
Curtis again: âThe Phoenix directors systematically restructured the business. They did it in a way that ensured that many economic benefits flowed not to MG Rover and the thousands of workers, but to the directors themselves and the man they appointed chief executive of MG Rover.
âThe [government] report [into the collapse of MG Rover] is over 800 pagesâand it is a fascinating snapshot of our time. It lists all sorts of schemes with names like “Project Slag”, “Project Platinum” and “Project Aircraft”âall of them designed to try and bring profits not into MG Rover but into the holding company set up by the Phoenix consortium.â
No more western superiority here: chaosâwhether in the political, social, cultural or commercial realmsâbreeds opportunity for many. The trick is always to ensure that the opportunists are those who can put things right, rather than selfishly benefit themselves. Some might see Curtisâs blog entry as a criticism of the monetarist, technocratic systemâas was The Mayfair Set.
But it is equally a story about how the absence of transparency breeds systems that benefit the fewâregardless of whether the background is communism or capitalism.
These are themes that we at the Medinge Group explored as early as 2003 in Beyond Branding, written in the wake of the Enron collapse. Weâve partly stayed on the same theme over the last eight years, because history shows us that transparency is often the enemy of inequity and unfairness. And even the technocracy.
When I go on about free wifi, itâs not just some vague election promise. Someone mentioned that I should have put the reason behind the message on my first billboard, but the reasons are too plentiful.
Itâs not just about giving businesses and tourists the access they expect in a modern society. Itâs also about signalling that Wellington is open for business, especially the type that can grow this economy with Kiwi entrepreneurship at its core. And itâs a great tool for transparency. Brad Gallen shared this link, and while these werenât the apps I had in mind originally, they show that in a creative world, people will come up with great ideas if you give them the infrastructure.
While the Open311 API has come from San Francisco, under Mayor Gavin NewsomâJenâs husbandâthereâs no reason we couldnât have come up with it here. But now that it has been developed, we should use it. There are five apps that Mashable has identifiedâand these are the sorts of things I can envisage popping up in Wellington if I am elected mayor.
Wellingtonians can elect someone who will give little more than lip service to transparency and technology, or someone who will use both to create and grow the city we deserve.
My friend and colleague at the Medinge Group, Ava Hakim, passed on a few papers from her day job at IBM. The first is the latest edition of a biennial global CEO survey, while the second asks the next generation of leadersâGeneration Y. The aim: to find out what these groups think about the challenges and goals for CEOs.
Unsurprisingly, both studies (involving thousands of respondents) had commonalities, though Generation Y placed global awareness and sustainability more highly on their list. Creativity, however, is ranked as the most valuable leadership trait. What society doesnât need, they tell us, is the same-again thinking if we are to make progress in the 2010s. The old top values of âoperational excellenceâ or âengineering big dealsâ no longer come up top in this new decade.
Or, as I heard from one gentleman yesterday, we canât afford to have the sort of âexperienceâ certain people tout, for they do not have 25 yearsâ experienceâthey just have one yearâs experience, over and over again, 25 times.
You know Iâm going to say it, so I might as well: this sounds like the sort of âexperienceâ some of my political opponents have had, day in, day out. Groundhog Day comes to mind.
Indeed, the studies indicate that we have a far more complex world, and same-again thinking isnât going to cut it.
In the first study (emphasis in original):
Creativity is the most important leadership quality, according to CEOs. Standouts practice and encourage experimentation and innovation throughout their organizations. Creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.
The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. They are adopting new channels to engage and stay in tune with customers. By drawing more insight from the available data, successful CEOs make customer intimacy their number-one priority.
Later:
Facing a world becoming dramatically more complex, it is interesting that CEOs selected creativity as the most important leadership attribute. Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles, particularly to engage with a new generation of employees, partners and customers.
And:
Creative leaders consider previously unheard-of ways to drastically change the enterprise for the better, setting the stage for innovation that helps them engage more effectively with todayâs customers, partners and employees.
The study also highlights an increase in globalization, especially in developing markets, leading to greater complexity. It also says the most successful leaders are prepared to change the business models under which they operate.
In fact, the world we now live in demands that our leaders are globally aware, and see the need to compete in a global market-place.
The implications for this city are that Wellington can no longer afford to see itself as merely the capital of New Zealand or the geographic centre. It is one of many cities that must compete for attention and resources at a global levelâwhich means creating world-class centres of excellence for our industries. Creating such clusters can even help them stay domestically owned.
The study indicates that the style of leadership is going to be, necessarily, internationalistâwhich means we canât afford to have leaders who are monocultural, and fake multiculturalism. This, like any aspect of a brand, must be embodied for real. It doesnât mean giving up what âbeing a New Zealanderâ is; it does, however, mean that we have to be able to communicate with other nations and cultures, seeking advantages for ourselves.
Innovation is a driver both in terms of internal processes and as a core competenceâso leaders had better be prepared to do this. And being closer and more transparent with customersâor in the case of a city, citizensâis something practised by the most successful leaders, says the study. It reminds me of the topics in the first book I contributed to, Beyond Brandingâwhere integrity and transparency were at the core.
When it comes to the Generation Y study, the results were similar. This table summarizes the two quite well, and notes how the two groups differ:
I donât want to be giving the impression that the second study is less important, but realize that some of you are sorely tempted to see me wrap up this post.
I will say, quickly, that the lessons are clear: the next generation expects leaders to be globally minded and sustainable.
Chinese respondents in the second study, in fact, valued global thinking ahead of creativity. This perhaps highlights where the Peopleâs Republic, above the other Chinese territories, is heading: looking outwardly first and delivering what customers in export markets want.
As creativity is naturally a trait among Wellington businesses, itâs nice to know that many are already prepared for the challenges of the 2010s. And some of our most successful names would not have got to where they are without global thinking, even if some have been acquired by overseas companies: 42 Below, Weta, and Silverstripe come to mind.
However, I canât see these traits being reflected in politicsâand thatâs something I hope we can change in the local body elections, for starters.
There have been a few times in the history of this blog where I stepped away from writing regularly. At the end of 2006, I had a pretty good excuse: I was in France. This time, my reasons for stepping away for a few weeks do not include: (a) I was spending too much time with the Miss Universe New Zealand contestants; (b) laziness; (c) being trapped in 1983 and discovering that DCI Gene Hunt controls the Lost island.
I was, however, chatting to a few more of the parties that we needed to realize some of my election promises. And doing a few media interviews. And looking at more ways Wellington could get nearer balancing its budget, as our deficit has ballooned over the last decade.
On May 15, I joined my opponent, Councillor Celia Wade-Brown, on Access Radioâs Espace Français, in what was my first political interview in French. I expected a nice-natured chat till our hosts said they wanted a political debate. So the Councillor and I gave the audience one, coming from very different angles. I believe we are the only two Francophone candidates. And I donât think Access does a Cantonese programme.
You can listen to the interview here, though they only store the programmes for six weeks. You can also download from this link.
I kept Leauna Zheng waiting for weeks while I prepared my emailed responses to her interview for Skykiwi, the leading Chinese expatsâ site in New Zealand. Despite her wait, she wrote a marvellous article (in Chinese, here), and for those of you relying on Google Translate, please note that the term Chinese expatriate is not translated correctly. (I believe this is the first Chinese-language interview to include my name in Chinese ideographs.)
And, finally, my interview with Bharat Jamnadas on Asia Down Under aired last Sunday. Heâs very kindly put it on YouTube, though the aspect ratio is a tad off and I look thinner than usual. There are very nice comments from two members of the Wellington business community, Laurie Foon of Starfish and Brent Wong of Soi, to whom I am extremely grateful.
The conversation at the end about Wellington v. Auckland was a good laugh, but there were some serious bits.
And this Tuesday just gone, it was a pleasure to play a âdragonâ in a Dragonâs Den-style setting analysing some of New Zealandâs entrepreneurs for New Zealand Trade & Enterprise.
My thanks to Bharat, Leauna, Kenneth Leong, Laura Daly at Access Radio, Jean-Louis Durand and Arlette Bilounga, and Maria Gray and David Powell.
Incidentally, we have added a Facebook widget for my campaign page on this blog. Itâs been placed at a few locations on my sites. Also, as of today, backjack2010.com redirects to jackyanformayor.orgâitâs important to have the consistency in the domain name and the campaign graphic (thanks to Demian Rosenblatt).
As of tonight, the Beyond Branding Blog, where I first cut my teeth blogging, is no more.
The posts are still there, but no further comments can be entered on to the site. The nearly four years of posts remain as an archive of some of our branding thought of that period.
The blog had a huge number of fans in its day, but as each one of us went to our own blogs, there seemed little need to keep it going. Chris Macrae and I were the last two holding the fort in late 2005. Since January 2006, no new posts have been entered on to the site. No new comments have come in a year.
Googleâs announcement that it would end FTP support for blogs in May spurred me into action, and I advised the Medinge Groupâs membership this morning that I would take it off the Blogger service.
I altered the opening message to reflect the latest change.
I was very proud of the blog, because it was the first one I was involved in. It was also the first I customized to match the look and feel of the rest of the Beyond Branding site, which I designed in 2003. While the design is one from the early 2000s, it has not dated as much as I had expected. Beyond Brandingâs core message of transparency and integrity remains valid, so while the blog is no longer updated, I think the book remains relevant to the 2010s.
