History repeats itself

["Hugh & Therese" <hugtrees@xxxxxxxx>]

The old story goes something like this:  An Imperial owner is buying gas.
An interested bystander is enamored of the Imperial and asks enthusiastic
questions about it.  One of these includes price.  His visceral response on
the answer is, "For that much you could have got a Caddy."

The essential element missing from the Imperial equation was "prestige."
Unlike Lincoln and Cadillac, Imperial never truly made it to the exalted
ranks of being a true prestige car.  It has long been my contention that
this is squarely the fault of the old Chrysler Corporation.  In their own
minds it was an advert for the rest of the line up, a loss maker that might
attract the more wealthy client into the showrooms in order to switch them
to a reasonably similarly equipped Chrysler, De Soto, Dodge or Plymouth.
The Imperial never got its own distribution chain, unlike Ford and Cadillac.

I have been accused of "revisionism" for promulgating this idea, although
this was a decidedly minority response.  However, exactly the gas station
scenario happened to me when I was trying to sell a Chrysler Pacifica
yesterday.  "For that sort of money I could get an Escalade."  I have had to
attend many meetings about the Pacifica and sit through several CDs worth of
introductory material.  Each one repeats ad nauseam the idea that the
Pacifica is up against premium completion - the BMW X5, Acura MDX and Lexus
330.  However, despite our new German ownership, the old mistake is being
repeated.  They can say what they like till they are blue in the face, but
the Chrysler brand is not a prestige brand.

There is a 76 year old salesman at our dealership who sold his first car in
1952.  He inherited his fathers, and his fathers before him, dealership and
ran it until the late 80's.  It was in a small Texas town.  I asked him
about selling Imperials and he said they were a real pain in the butt for
him.  He was obligated to take several of them a year by Chrysler in order
to be allocated a larger amount of better selling vehicles.  He was also
obligated to maintain a certain inventory of spare parts and get training
for technicians on a car which would never yield back the investment.  The
dealership for which I work is in a similar situation with the Pacifica.
They are an obligation for doing business, they are being very poorly
marketed by a corporate management team that has begun to believe its own
illusory promotions.  (Let's just say it is even further handicapped than
the Imperial in that it is a dull vehicle, and leave it at that.)

Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.  With the
right support, the Imperial could have been a strong contender.  Lousy build
quality in its most successful year - 1957 - and an inadequate distribution
network scuttled it pretty effectively.  How many non-Imperial Mopar
enthusiasts know enough about your car to not cal it a Chrysler Imperial?
And if they can't be bothered to get it right, who else might?

We have Concorde LXis and Limiteds we can only unload with steep discounts.
Sigh.  The beat(ing) goes on.

Hugh