We will analyze how fashions energize or calm design standards in the automotive industry.
In order to explain the subject, it is important to bear in mind the following concepts. A style is a distinctive way of expression, can be seen in the architecture of a city, for example, colonial style. Once imposed the style can last several generations, being and ceasing to be cyclically fashionable.
Fashion is a style popularly accepted in a certain field, presenting different stages. Initially, consumers are interested in being an innovative product or style, different from others. Then other people try to belong to that group, and later this fashion becomes massively adopted. The last phase sees people abandon one fashion and move on to another later.
The bottom line is that fashions grow slowly, are popular for a short period of time and gradually descend. There is a type called “passenger fashions”, they tend to last very short because they do not meet a real market need.
Now let's relate the explained in the introduction to the automotive industry. A clear example of fashion with cyclical periods of boom is the use of chrome decorative elements. Between the forties and sixties he abused the use of rods, ferrices, handles, etc... all chrome plated. The brighter a car, the more important and luxurious it was considered, without even belonging to a segment of expensive cars.
Any Chevrolet was called elegant because it had the aforementioned characteristics, being that in the US a Chevrolet is the most popular (cheap and massive) car of General Motors. In the eighties and nineties the rods disappeared or were painted black. Window frames and optics were smaller in size and more sober in appearance.
Today, the fashion for chrome plating has resurfaced. The retro -trend concept cars reincorporate the chrome details, but much more refined than their counterparts of the past.
Since the late nineties, Chrysler vans have exhibited grotesque grills that reflect everything around them. This trend is observed in the elegant details of the English Rover, the German BMW and even all the vans of American companies, Chevrolet, Cadillac, Ford, Lincoln, etc. Examples like this there are many, optical formats, overhangs sizes, tail spoilers, number of rays present on the tires, etc.
Always keep in mind: on very few occasions fashions respond to the real needs of end users of products, but marketing strategists want to convey a certain message or engage a certain type of consumer audience and use resources such as fashions to achieve their goals.
Let me add a personal thought: “A good customer is not one who buys a lot and of the standard. An intelligent consumer is one who raises his concerns, and with his purchasing decisions he rewards the one he develops on the basis of needs.”
On the other hand, it encourages those who do not sell to detect the advantages of their rivals, and thus indirectly leads them to investigate the needs of the recipient and not how to meet them, but how to exceed their initial expectations.
© Adrián Blanco 2004 — Prohibited the total or partial reproduction of text and/or images without explicit written consent of the author. —