Cadillac General Manager John Grettenberger grabbed the phone and called Janet Eckhoff, his new director of advertising and market planning. The 56-year-old Grettenberger wanted to pass along his suggestion for a name for the LSE, the new small, European-built Cadillac that goes into production in 1996 and is designed to appeal to women.
His idea-Vacaro, a takeoff on the Spanish word for cowboy-got a chilly response from Eckhoff.
“When I told her what the name meant, she said what!?” Grettenberger related in a recent interview.
“It’s got a nice ring to it,” he said. “It means a wrangler, a tough guy out on the range. . . . I’ve submitted some names, but they seem to come out too masculine.”
And that’s a habit General Motors Corp. and other luxury automakers are trying to break as they scramble to tap the growing number of younger, upscale professional women buyers. The new approach extends from the planning stages of putting a new car on the market to the way women are drawn into dealerships and treated after they buy a car.
But foreign and domestic automakers have a ways to go in answering the question: “What do women want?”
“Most car dealers ignore you after they make the sale and that’s the wrong way to deal with women,” said Alice Sieloff, 49, the publisher of Detroit and Lansing Metropolitan Woman magazine who recently leased a 1994 Mark VIII after driving a Cadillac Seville STS a couple of years.
Sieloff loved her Cadillac, but was disappointed that she never heard from her dealer as her lease was about to expire. However, Signature Ford in Owosso outside of Lansing, courted her with attention and butter cookies.
Her pearl white Mark VIII with a black leather interior was delivered to her Detroit home in a van, so it would not have any miles on it, Sieloff said. She received follow-up calls on her purchase from the salesperson, the service manager and the owner of the dealership. And she and her staff received tins of gourmet butter cookies. Sieloff, who, as a publisher, markets to women and knows what they want, loved the special treatment.
“Men (buyers) have a cold streak,” Sieloff said. “They say: `Gimme the deal, gimme the car and leave me alone.’ Women want something different.” Automakers are beginning to pick up on the differences.
Infiniti, the luxury division of Nissan, surveyed women and found that the most distasteful part of buying a car is stepping into the showroom. “Women told us, `We hate buying cars. It’s a war zone out there. It’s threatening,’ ” said Peter Harris, model line manager at Infiniti in Gardena, Calif.
To ease women into showrooms, Infiniti began a lecture series four years ago called “Women’s Forum,” in 35 U.S. dealerships across the country to soft-sell cars to women. The dealership holds a cocktail party-minus salespeople-in the showroom, followed by a lecture on non-automotive women’s issues such as health and relationships.
From June 21 through September, Infiniti will hold 43 seminars. Though no Illinois dealers will be participating this year, Capitol Infiniti in Milwaukee will hold a seminar July 13. Call 414-355-4000 for reservations.
The approach apparently works. When New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen spoke to 200 women last year at the Douglas Infiniti dealership in Summit, N.J., owner Jon Liebman reported that he sold seven cars-worth more than $250,000-to attendees.
Infiniti found that 12 percent of the women attending the 1993 seminars bought a car afterward.
This year, Infiniti hopes to have similar results with John Gray, the author of the best-selling book “Women Are From Venus, Men Are From Mars.”
Infiniti officials also credit women in focus groups with the interior and exterior appearance of its 1994 Q45. Women told the automaker they wanted the car to have a less masculine look and Infiniti responded by using softer, gathered leather on the seats and chrome-like pinstripe trim around the taillights, the windshield and on the sides.
European automakers also acknowledge the importance of women in the luxury market. At BMW of North America, the top-selling European brand in the U.S., about a dozen female executives lobbied to move beyond symbolic gestures such as sponsoring the Danskin (a leotard maker) Triathalon for women and developing a line of purses and scarves bearing the BMW symbol. BMW found that the women wanted to talk transmissions.
So, the corporation put trendwatcher Faith Popcorn on retainer and held a first-of-its-kind meeting in January between the 18-month-old Market Advisory Council, made up of seven female executives, and an all-male group of 12 high-level platform engineers who flew to the corporation’s U.S. headquarters in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., from the automaker’s headquarters in Munich.
“We wanted go beyond cosmetics . . . to dispel the notion that women are just looking for nice colors,” says Marie Paret, who heads the council and is BMW project manager for Retail 2000, a program designed to improve the ways cars are sold and serviced. “Women don’t want a car designed for them. But we still wanted to hone in on product issues.”
The Market Advisory Council is determined to convey the female needs of the U.S. market, which is substantially different from the German one. In Germany, only 9 percent of the BMWs are sold to professional women, compared to 33 percent here. Officials admit they still have a long way to go in attracting women to some of their bigger, more expensive cars. The 740i, for example, has a poor following among women-men make up about 85 percent of sales-because of its high price. The car has a base price of $55,950.
Surveys conducted by J.D. Power and Associates, the California-based marketing firm, underscore the need for automakers to turn their attention to upscale female buyers.
Power’s Early Buyer Studies have tracked significant growth in the number of women who purchased new vehicles-to 42 percent in 1993 from 32 percent in 1991. A smaller percentage of women, however, buy luxury cars, and those who do tend to favor imports.
“Over the last three years, female buyers have become more important to the industry, and Infiniti and Lexus have generally followed that trend,” says William Fleming, market research director for Power. “But Cadillac has gone against the trend, with women actually accounting for fewer sales last year (than they did in 1991).”
As Cadillac’s traditional buyers-older, wealthy males age 55 to 75-die off and overseas competitors continue to nibble at its flanks, the division is targeting younger, upscale professional women to fill the void.
Cadillac is serious about this: for the first time, there is a line item in the divisional budget devoted to developing a strategy to woo women. Finance Director Chris Mazglad, who in 25 years with the division has worked her way up to become its highest-ranking woman, won’t reveal the amount, but other officials confirm that it’s well into seven figures.
The division’s marketing plans include:
– A Women’s Target Marketing Study done this spring in Philadelphia and Minneapolis-St. Paul.
– New feminine colors, including a dusty rose that will debut in 1997, on all Cadillacs.
– Sensitivity training for dealers to help welcome women and minority buyers into showrooms.
The effort has begun to draw attention from industry analysts, though Cadillac says it’s too early to determine what effect it’s having on sales.
“Cadillac has always tried to court women buyers,” says Christopher Cedergren, executive vice president of AutoPacific Group, a consulting firm based in Newport Beach, Calif. “(But) this effort is a full-court press.”
Cedergren, who says he’s a Cadillac historian in his spare time, adds: “They won’t win those buyers with rose-colored cars, though. Their main problem stems from the fact that Cadillac has been slow to respond to the new generation of luxury buyers. The product has not been there. And besides, the way you court her is the way you court males. Because women want the same thing as men. They want good product, a good deal and good service.”
Cadillac officials acknowledge the problem and defend their new agenda.
“What we’ve always managed to do really well is to get the older, traditional, well-heeled female into our cars,” said Eckhoff, 44, who was named advertising and market planning director in January. “What we haven’t done as good a job at is to get the younger, professional women into our cars. They’re buying Infiniti, (and) they’re buying Lexus. Basically what’s happening is they’re bringing their import-orientation into their travel, into a more upscale automobile. They’re not all buying imports, but (the imports are) doing better than we are.”
To remedy that, Cadillac will go beyond what many luxury automakers are doing to lure women into the fold.
Women who go into showrooms in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Phiadelphia to test drive cars will have a $50 donation made in their name to charities with an emphasis on women’s issues. Also, women may receive a $50 or $100 gift certificate to Neiman Marcus for purchasing a car.
Liz Wetzel, Cadillac assistant chief designer, explains the philosophy behind the marketing strategy: “We’re trying to appeal to people, (especially) women, with no brand loyalty.”
And brand loyalty is the bottom line.
As Deborah Thayer, media planning manager for Infiniti, notes: “Women are very, very loyal. When they have a good experience, they want to share it with other people.”
