The critics of market economies like to portray advertising as an all-powerful insidious force that turns people into helpless,

robotic consumers. Reality is quite different perhaps to the disappointment of marketers who would find the critics fantasy much more hospital professionally. The authors of this paper examined the car market and concluded that expensive advertising cannot compensate for weak brands and undifferentiated products. Automotive brands capture a relatively large share of attention yet remain poorly understood, according to Hirsh, Hedlund, and Schweizer. They applied statistical techniques to analyze multiple brand image attributes and uncover five underlying factors that illuminate consumer brand perceptions. The results will be discouraging to believers in the power of brands. The research indicates that consumers have a simple yet distinguished understanding of what differentiates car brands. Despite automakers consistent use of lifestyle or emotional imagery, the relatively high cost of a car motivates consumers to evaluate brands according to their earned reputation for product excellence relative to their total cost of ownership. The large spending commitment represented by automobile purchases probably explains why automotive brand perceptions are more closely tied to the products qualities than appears to be the case for most other goods. Managers who want to strengthen and leverage the value of their brands will want to take a look at these five conclusions arrived at by the authors: 1. Virtually all of the difference in how consumers perceive competing brands can be explained by their relative performance against two holistic measures: product excellence and cost. 2. Consumers are not only elegantly simple in their view of automotive brands, they are acutely rational as well. 3. The relative magnitude of product excellence and low cost of ownership determines a brands value proposition in the marketplace. 4. Brands in crowded, weakly positioned clusters tend to suffer from eroding margins. 5. Brand positions tend to change relatively little over time. The authors relate these five findings to four important implications for manufacturers: Tangible product differentiation is both critical to success and difficult to maintain on a sustained basis; Minimizing cost of ownership (both up-front acquisition cost and long-term ownership cost) within the segment boundary is critical; Lifestyle and emotional imagery cannot compensate for weak brands and undifferentiated products; and for mass-market vehicles, incentives are a symptom of a weak brand not the cause