I can remember years ago traveling across the country and stopping for breakfast at a Waffle House in the middle of Missouri. There in the parking lot – as though sprung from some stereotype-xeroxing machine – was a guy, in cowboy boots, with one foot on the dropped tailgate of his pickup truck, and playing the guitar. It could have been out of a movie. I mean, he was doing some sort of foggy mountain breakdown, and wasn’t half bad if you like your music tinged with hillbilly.
The other thing that I remember about that particular portion of the trip was seeing on billboards and TV that Kate Jackson was hawking Lincoln Mercury products out there. That struck me as interesting because at the very same time, Lindsey Wagner – another ’70s TV veteran trying to keep up her kids’ private school payments – was doing the same thing for the Southern California Ford Dealers. And she was doing a pretty bang-up job of it too. I figured it was the former Bionic Woman’s success for the Ford dealers that drove other FoMoCo advertising departments to try out the former glory actor match ups.
Neither of those women were really what you’d call industry experts however, and some car makers have preferred to let their executives do the talking. Perhaps the most famous example of that was Chrysler bigwig Lee Iacocca telling the America that had just loaned the precipice-hanging car maker a butt-load of cash that if they could find a better car to buy it. It was a ballsy move and saved the company for another day when Daimler could buy them, and then later Fiat. The question for today is, whether an executive steeped in car culture, or aspirational celebrity whose opinion could drive your decisions, who do you think has been the best automotive spokesperson?
Image source: freep.com
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