It isn’t much fun being a Buick dealer nowadays.
You are shut out of the hot pickup-truck and sport-utility-vehicle markets, and your product lineup consists mostly of large, conservative sedans. Baby Boomers and their kids won’t touch your cars, and the die-hard Buick loyalists in their 50s and 60s are starting to, well, die off.
This adds up to a tough marketing challenge for Buick, a unit of General Motors Corp., which as recently as the 1991 model year could do no wrong. That year, a down one for the industry, Buick led automakers in increased sales and tied with Toyota Motor Corp. in increased market share, taking 4.3 percent of the U.S. car and light-truck market.
Since then, though, Buick’s market share has slipped, and its sales have been essentially flat in a growing market. Now U.S. vehicle sales are slowing, and Buick’s problems are mounting. In the first five months of the year, Buick sales fell 17 percent, and its market share slipped to 3 percent from 3.4 percent. Last year, Buick sold 546,836 cars, down from its peak of 941,611 in 1984. Some auto-industry analysts expect Buick’s annual sales to drift down through the end of this decade.
“Buick is really struggling,” says a GM executive in another car division. John F. Smith Jr., GM’s chief executive, adds that Buick is part of a broader marketing problem GM has to solve. “Large cars seem to be out,” Smith says.
Some gloomy Buick dealers compare their situation with the one at Oldsmobile, another GM division whose sales were evaporating just a few years ago.
In the case of Oldsmobile, GM hit on a formula that is producing a gradual comeback. Energized by the fear of extinction, the Oldsmobile division put itself and its dealers through a radical culture change. Olds has been copying Saturn’s “no-haggle” sales formula and is being positioned to attract Saturn customers when they get ready to “step up” to bigger cars.
At Buick, though, there isn’t any sense that radical change is necessary. Management concedes that it would be nice to attract younger buyers, and it points to the new Riviera coupe as a step toward updating the line. But no new marketing approach is being contemplated, and dealers’ inventories of Buicks have been swollen for months. GM recently put marketing incentives on some models to increase sales.
“Our customers are going out the back door, and nobody’s coming in the front door,” laments Buzz Braley, a Buick dealer in Portland, Ore., whose grandfather started the family business in 1921, when Buick was a hot brand.
As the youthful customers who are buying sport-utility vehicles, pickup trucks and imports age, few experts think many of them will switch to Buicks. That’s because the younger generation associates Buicks with the boring, fuddy-duddy cars their parents and grandparents owned.
In Bloomfield Hills, Mich., 21-year-old Stacy Taylor takes that view. Taylor, a marketing major at Michigan State University, prefers Japanese and European cars. A Buick? Never. “They’re too big, and they say `old.’ I like foreign cars better,” she says. Buick, Taylor says, “needs to do something about its image.”
Taylor’s father, Bill, disagrees. He’d love to own a Buick. He’d buy a Buick or an Oldsmobile if he had some extra cash, says Taylor, a 56-year-old machine maintenance worker. “I want a heavier, roomier car,” he says.
Buick executives say they’re comfortable with their role as a marketer of “Premium American Motor Cars” to a customer base between 51 and 62 years old. They figure that as Baby Boomers age, the market is moving in Buick’s direction, and there will always be customers who want roomy, conservative, domestic sedans. Indeed, Buick is playing up its middle-America image. Ronald Zarrella, GM’s new top marketing chief, says Buick dealerships should have a distinct “country club” feel inside.
Ed Mertz, Buick’s top executive, says Buick is making some minor changes to attract a slightly younger clientele. It is eliminating some of its dinosaur models, such as the boatlike Roadmaster. “And in the future, our cars will tend to have less chrome,” Mertz says.
The new Riviera luxury coupe, for example, looks and drives nothing like its plodding mass-marketed Buick brethren, such as the LeSabre, Century and Skylark.
Still, Buick’s cars always will appeal primarily to people in their 50s and 60s, Mertz says. The minor changes under way, he says, will make it “more and more acceptable for a 40-year-old to buy a Buick though I don’t want to say we’re moving the company in that direction.”
The question is whether, minus radical change, Buick will make the kinds of cars that people in their 30s and 40s will buy when they reach their 50s and 60s. Braley, the Oregon dealer, remains upbeat despite his growing inventory and slow sales. He admits that “the Buick isn’t a trendy car.” But, he says, Americans “mature to Buick.”
Not everyone inside Buick is sure. “How many of the Baby Boomers are we going to capture,” asks a manager, “if they grew up with Toyota?”
