A FORD MAN NO MORE, BUT THAT'S NO CAUSE FOR CHEVY TO CELEBRATE

I grew up a die hard Ford man. My father sold Fords, and playing around in the showroom and on the car lot, plus the unparalleled cool of the Mustang, was enough to hook me for life. And, of course, as a Ford man, I hated Chevrolets. The enemy, period!

A funny thing has occurred, though. When I look into my yard we have two vehicles parked there. A Dodge Grand Caravan and, gasp, a Chevy truck. How's that happen? Easy. Ford lost me. And, if you're a Chevy man or a Dodge fan, don't get excited. Neither GM or Chrysler did one thing to gain me, and if I'd have been a die hard loyalist to one of them, they'd have lost me, too.

And it wasn't all the crappy cars all the American automakers put on the road in the 70's and 80's. I was entrenched in the buy American thing enough to overlook that (illogical as that was. If we were going to be loyal enough to them to buy their cars, shouldn't they be loyal enough to us to make decent cars?). No, it was the systematic destruction each of these automakers (and their rivals in Japan and Europe) did to their brands. After all, it's brands that we're loyal to. And that loyalty doesn't require logic. But it does require brand management, something automakers, along with many other businesses, have gotten away from.


First the car companies destroyed their own "stepping stone" brand model. See, this is how they drew it up years ago. I was supposed to buy a Ford or two, then step up to a Mercury, and aspire to one day be a Lincoln man. Made sense. The GM chain was supposed to go Chevy to Pontiac to Buick to Oldsmobile to Cadillac. But instead of keeping their lines specific, assigning the appropriate cars to the appropriate brands they started competing with each other. Chevy wanted to keep their customers, and build cars to compete with the other GM brands. Pontiac and Chevy competed with muscle cars. Chevy build sedans, just like Buick and Olds. Ford and Mercury went head to head, and, in the 70's, the sporty Ford Thunderbird inexplicably morphed into a Lincoln wanna-be for a few years.

Next, the accountants took this last bad move a step further, and as a money saving move, demanded that the various "brands" (by now, a dubious use of the term) within the company essentially release the same cars with different names. Now every Ford had an easily recognizable Mercury counterpart, every Chevrolet a matching Pontiac.

Then, they abandoned the traditional brand dealership model. Instead of a Ford or Ford/Mercury/Lincoln dealer, I started seeing Fords available at the same dealership that sold Dodges and Pontiacs and, gasp, Chevrolets. So the guy who was selling me a car didn't have any particular loyalty to Ford. He'd be just as happy to have me in one of those tacky, over-styled Camaros. He might even be peddling Toyotas and Hondas. These things are starting to look a lot like commodities, huh?

Meanwhile, as the Japanese and European Automakers build assembly plants in America, the American automakers started building plants oversees. Now, all of these companies are publicly traded, sold internationally as stocks and bonds. I can own part of Toyota. People in Japan and Germany can own stock in Ford. And, to further confuse matters, the various companies started buying each other. So tell me, Mr. Buy American, just what is an American automobile?

Everything about the romance of the Ford brand got sucked out of it. Everything that lead to me a making an emotional commitment to Ford - it's gone! I decide what type of vehicle I need and I go find the best deal. I'm shopping based on price, period. Just like I buy oranges, flour, gasoline, sugar, etc. Commodities. Would I ever buy a Ford again? Certainly. I'm just as likely to buy a Ford as any other car on the market. I'm just not any more likely to buy one.

While the Ford Motor Company took the brunt of this blog, and automakers in general seem to be the subject, the lesson is for all business. We live in a day and age where strong, established brand loyalties are threatened on every front - by idiots with marketing majors who push brand extension (a greed-driven brand death sentence every time), by accountants slashing costs at all costs (and usually slashing the very things that make their brands special) and by management that just can't wrap their brain around the esoteric, emotional characteristics that don't show up in a PowerPoint presentation or a spread sheet, but make all the difference in a loyal customer's mind.

Brand loyalty is not, has not ever been, logical. But it is vital! It's the most valuable thing a product can own. And it's usually destroyed from within. Indeed, I'm a Ford man no more, but that's no cause for Chevy to celebrate.

WEDDING VOWS, NEW CAR SMELL & BAD ADVICE FROM YODA

First of all, I'm no marriage expert. In fact, I don't believe such a person exists. It's a tricky institution, with a lot of strange curves and oncoming traffic - no easy feat to navigate. And I'm far from the perfect husband - not very romantic, not overly observant...geez, I'm not even handy around the house.

But I am a huge believer in the institution of marriage. And, for all my faults, I'm a happily married man. going on nineteen years now. And I do have a few opinions (just opinions, not facts, relax) on why Michelle and I have been able to hold it together through thick or thin all these years.

First of all, I never counted on her to make me happy. She never saw me as her source of happiness. We love each other, we thoroughly enjoy each other's company, but nobody can make someone else happy. It's an unrealistic expectation to think that they can. Laying that on someone else is a doomsday sentence.

Secondly, I don't believe love has anything to do with emotion. I think it's a commitment. We not only said our marriage vows, we meant them. Have we come up short from time to time? Certainly. We're humans. But we are both committed to living our lives together in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer (in our case, pretty much for poorer), in good times and bad, until death do us part. Yeah, we vowed to death. Again, I don't believe love has anything to do with emotions, which means it isn't a feeling, which means it isn't fleeting, which means it doesn't pass, which means (I believe - strictly an opinion) it makes no sense to vow "as long as love shall last". To me, that's vowing to be committed as long as I remain committed, which would be meaningless (to me).

Thirdly, I like my wife, a lot. We don't do separate vacations. I don't do boys nights out. She doesn't do girls nights out. We let go of everything that was integral to our single lives. We have one married life - together. I'd rather be with her than anyone I know. It sounds like a cliche, but my wife is my best friend. I trust her implicitly, and I love being around her.

You know that giddy feeling all of us thought was love in our teenage years, that feeling so many of us think is love even as we grow up. I got that feeling about almost ever girlfriend I ever had. 'Thought I was in love. I've come to realize what that feeling is, and it isn't love. It's new car smell. New girl, exciting change, everything's different, all giddy. New car smell. Until the first ding shows up on the driver's side door. No more new car smell. No more "love". It took me a long time to realize it's hard to find what you're looking for when you don't even know what to look for.

Not to mention how up and down anything based on emotions are. I always love Michelle. Even when I'm mad at her. Even when I'm mumbling under my breath about her, down in the basement, while she's upstairs, temporarily forgetting about her "super hearing" (I swear, she can hear me mumble about her from three states away). But that's how emotions are, and anything that inconsistent is nothing to base anything important on. Yoda was dead wrong on that one - Think, don't feel - that's what he should've told the Jedis. (Then again, Yoda ended up getting almost all the Jedi wiped out, so take his wisdom for what it's worth. Listening to Yoda will get you killed.)

I'm a much better husband than I was eighteen years ago. I've steadily improved. In fact, as I see it, I've reached the point of downright mediocrity. So I have a long way to go. Trust me, I'm not bragging about how perfect I am or have been. 'Far from it. But I've come along way. And I've got a best friend that I get to spend the rest of my life with while I work the rest of it out.

(The happy couple, & the lucky guy!)

WHAT KIND OF MEN WERE THESE?

I'm a bit of a Civil War buff, not a hardcore collector of memorabilia or a devoted historian, but clearly someone who finds the war, the events leading up to it, and how it impacted life in its day. So when we got the chance to live in Charlottesville, Virginia for a few years in the 1990's, I relished the proximity to so much Civil War history. I saw Bull Run, Appomattox Courthouse, etc. but one of the most lasting impressions came on a fall drive along Skyline Drive. I found myself looking down from the lofty overlooks at the rugged Shenandoah Valley, thinking how Stonewall Jackson lead a barefoot army through that terrain in the dead of winter! What kind of men were these, anyway?

This weekend, I spent two days on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, including visiting some old friends who happened to be staying in the charming beach village of Salvo, just past Rodanthe, the town once called Chicamacomico, where the old pre-Coast Guard U.S. Life Saving Station still sits. As I drove by the historic site I recalled an account North Carolina historian David Stick recorded of that very Life Saving Station's crew gathering around their breakfast table writing out their last will and testaments before heading out one foggy morning to respond to the cries of a ship not even visible beyond the breakers, on a day when conditions convinced the men they would not be returning alive. (Ultimately, they did make it back, and made it back with the ship's passengers). Again I ask, what kind of men were these?

These accounts aren't that unusual - the Charge of the Light Brigade, doomed as they were; Washington crossing the Delaware on a cold, Christmas morning; a group of colonist standing up to the almighty British Crown and signing their name to a bold declaration of Independence, assuming they were signing their death sentences. What kind of men, indeed?Which brings us to 2010 - a day when divide and conquer is rule of the day, no one seems to take responsibility for anything, choosing rather to cast blame, never dealing in honest dialogue and debate, preferring to spin their opposition's perspective into some kind of DC Comics-like twisted super-villain scheme. We've allowed ourselves to be reduced to name calling, immature brats, spitting and cursing across the aisle at "the other side" - black vs. white, rich vs. poor, north vs. south, left vs. right, boy vs. girl, and so it goes. All the while, we're all in the same boat. Regardless of who's right and who's wrong (and we're all wrong about plenty, no doubt) we're going to succeed or fail together. At this rate, our failure is assured. No one is taking the bull by the horns and doing the dirty work needed to fight through and survive.

What we need is that kind of men that marched barefoot across the snowy Shenandoah, that wrote out their wills and dragged the heavy surfboat miles across the sandy beach at Chicamacomico and into the surf to brave the breakers. Where do we find that kind of men? If we can't find them within our selves, we may be doomed.