One hundred years of Chevy

There is surely no other brand name more closely woven into the fabric of American popular culture than that of Chevy.

The Chevrolet story that began one 100 years ago this week has become emblematic of American life and its varying fortunes over the last century.

Chevy’s great era was the 1950s. It was a time of growth and national optimism and Chevy was a part of it. America grew up in a Chevy. They have been celebrated in song over the decades and invariably with a sense of nostalgia for a different time.

Don McLean’s opaque but haunting American Pie entered our collective consciousness in 1971 with its wistful longing for a simpler age that ended abruptly “the day the music died”. Lines such as “bye-bye Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry” made it one of the most discussed, dissected and universally memorable popular songs of all time.

The Chevrolet story itself began in Detroit on November 3, 1911. William Crapo Durant, an automotive visionary and founder of the General Motors Holding Company, had just been ousted by the company’s bankers. He joined forces with Louis Chevrolet, a dashing Swiss-born racing driver, and together they set up Chevrolet (“pronounced “Shev-Ro-Lay”) a new carmaker named in Chevrolet’s honor and, no doubt, an attempt to trade on his ‘brand’.

Louis Chevrolet, in a Buick

Chevrolet boomed, outflanking rival Ford with a range of models and was later folded into GM with Durant briefly regained control. By the 1960s, the era of the fabulous, bullet-shaped Corvette Stingray, Chevrolet accounted for about half of GM’s 60% share of America’s car market.

The now iconic Chevrolet bowtie logo first appeared in 1913 but its origins are hazy. Popular legend has it that impulsive Durant saw the design in a wallpaper pattern on a French hotel room wall and ripped a piece off. Another story has it that Louis Chevrolet fancied a logo in a stylized version of the Swiss cross in honor of his homeland.

Probably the most convincing account of the bowtie’s origin comes from more recent research by historian Ken Kaufmann*. He presents a case that the emblem is based upon a logo for “Coalettes”, a coal-based domestic fuel. According to records Durant’s wife is reported as saying that the emblem was first seen by Durant while they were vacationing in Hot Springs, Virginia. She is quoted as recalling: “We were in a suite reading the papers, and he saw this design and said ‘I think this would be a very good emblem for Chevrolet’.”

Disillusion set in during the 1970s. Different values took over. The company began to churn out nondescript rust traps such as the Vega and its reputation, along with the quality and design of its cars, went into a long tailspin, ending in GM’s bankruptcy and bail-out in 2009. Chevy’s market share was just 12.7%.

Even though a steady stream of attractive small cars has begun to restore Chevrolet’s fortunes, such as the Cruze, perceptions are slow to catch up.  The brand still has a long way to go before it means anything again.

As for Louis Chevrolet, he lost all his earnings in the stock market crash of 1929. Without income, he went to work as a line mechanic in a Chevrolet factory. He died nearly penniless on June 6, 1941 but he bequeathed his name to the world.

Could it be..?

*In his blog post “Chevrolet Bowtie History” Ken Kaufman writes: This past year I have been reading that great Southern newspaper, The Constitution, from Atlanta Georgia…when I ‘spotted’ this Coalettes bowtie ad, I think I experienced the same excitement Durant did almost eighty years ago, when he might have ‘spotted’ the same ad in the same paper. The date of this Constitution ad was November 12, 1911, nine days after the Chevrolet Motor Company was incorporated.

Related articles

• 100 years of Chevy: An improbable journey to American icon (usatoday.com)

How Apple got its name — the Steve Jobs version

“Executek,” “Matrix,” “Personal Computers Inc.” were among the names Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak considered for their company, according to Walter Isaacson in his newly-published biography of Steve Jobs.

Jobs proposed “Apple” after returning from a visit to All One Farm in Chimacum, WA where he had helped tend the apple trees.

“I was on one of my fruitarian diets,” Jobs told Isaacson. “I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’”

All One Family Farm, where Steve Jobs found his inspiration for Apple

If Allegis was the disease, is Xylem the cure?

More than 30 years ago Donald Trump managed to bring a visionary $2.3billion enterprise to its knees with a single withering remark. It wasn’t about the competence of the CEO, or the virtue of his problematic strategy. It was about the name of the company.

It was February 1987: Richard Ferris, CEO of UAL Corp., fatefully announced his company would, henceforth, be known as Allegis.

The name change was intended to reflect the broadened scope of the expensively constructed travel enterprise that included Hertz Car Rental, Westin and Hilton International hotel chains, as well as United Airlines.

“We are a travel company, not just a transportation company”, said Ferris. “Allegis clearly identifies us as the only corporation that can offer travelers door-to-door service.”

Investor activist Donald Trump saw things differently. ”It sounds like the next world-class disease,” was his biased diagnosis.

It was the beginning of the end for Ferris and Allegis. Investor discontent coalesced around the name change and within six months Ferris was gone and his grand plan was being dismantled.

Introducing Xylem and Exelis

What was not so easily quelled was the fear and loathing Allegis had generated about corporate names. More than three decades later the fallout still swirled around the corners of boardrooms like a toxic mist. “Don’t give us an Allegis” was the joke, and behind it there was real fear.

The chaotic creativity of the Internet age has eased the anxiety. The likes of Google, Hulu, Zoomba, Skype and Zoosk have, out of necessity, attuned our ears to exotic and unfamiliar nomenclature but not enough to prevent the occasional atavistic twitch from sections of the media over what they characterize gleefully as “disastrous corporate rebrandings”.

There are signs of a real thaw, however. Recently, the conglomerate now known as ITT decided to split itself into three, spinning off its water treatment business and its military business. After much deliberation by Lippincott, the same branding company that gave the world Allegis, they brought forth “Xylem” and “Exelis” as the names for the two new entities. They were met with the dull thud of indifference.

Only a botanist would know that Xylem is a Greek-derived word that refers to vascular tissue that carries water and nutrients through plants. Likewise, it would take a lepidopterist to know that Exelis is a genus of moth, but one can hazard a guess at the intended meaning. In reality both names are, to all intents and purposes, gloriously meaningless.

Where is the outrage, the rending of garments, the gnashing of teeth? There is none.

Admittedly, Qwikster has been given up by Netflix as a juicy sacrificial offering to placate the Rebranding Disaster Gods but Xylem may be the miracle drug it sounds like it should be.

Could Xylem be the cure for Allegis — that most pernicious of name-aversion diseases first exhibited by Donald Trump 34 years ago?

In the forlorn hope of finding fame and fortune, Jerry changes his name…

My mother came home from her work one day in the early 1960s and announced that she’d had an unimpressive encounter with what she described as a “foppish pop singer”.

How and where she met him has faded from memory, but his name I do recall: it was Jerry Dorsey. I remember it because not long afterwards he re-launched himself as Englebert Humperdinck in what was, I surmised at the time, a desperate attempt to escape the withering verdict of my mother.

There was a picture of the real Englebert Humperdinck on my classroom wall at school. He was equally unimpressive — an obscure 19^th century German composer with bizarre facial hair. This guy Jerry was surely a born loser. History tells a different story. He’s had quite a life.

Here’s an interesting roll-call of other singers who have similarly shed their mundane names on the road to fame and fortune, including Reg Dwight, Gordon Sumner and Chaim Weitz who are better known as…

http://tinyurl.com/6jkvceh

Bearish on America

What does it mean to be bullish?

Apart from being one letter short of bullshit, the allusion to being ‘bullish” in investment terms is self-explanatory. Bulls are symbols of power; they challenge and charge forward with aggression.

It’s no accident that Merrill Lynch, until recently the largest investment house in the world, had a bull in its logo. It was also famously ‘Bullish on America‘, a corporate slogan first introduced in a 60-minute ad during the telecast of the 1971 World Series.

At its height Merrill’s brokerage network, which reached 15,000 in 2006, was referred to as the “thundering herd”.

In 2008 the bears moved in and Merrill was well and truly savaged. The firm is now part of Bank of America, emasculated and caged. The effete-looking bull in its logo is gone. The mood is bearish.

No more bull

No investment house has dared adopt the slogan ‘Bearish on America’, even during periods of market decline. But why bears of all creatures – how do they characterize a market in retreat?

The term apparently dates to the early 1700s for someone who profits when stocks fall. “To sell a bear skin before one has caught the bear” was an early description of a short seller (someone who borrows shares and then sells them, hoping to buy them back at a lower price and pocket the difference).

A bear market originated from the same metaphor and has since been loosely defined only as “one in which selling preponderates and prices decline”.

According to the Wall Street Journal there is no such thing as an “official” bear market. It defines a bear market as a 20 percent decline from a closing high to a closing low on the Dow or the S&P 500.

Depending on when you start counting, stocks at any one time can either be in a bull market or a bear market. The Journal says they can often be in both at once, which really is bullshit when you think about it.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, 10 8 11. Wikipedia.

Related articles

• Is This a Bear Market or What? (online.wsj.com)

Steven P. Jobs

Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other peoples’ thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”