Mopar Marketing, Stellantis, and Quality: Come on, guys, get it together!

Hi there, this is Dave. Real life me, not AI this time. Personally, I prefer the AI, but

now you know that I'm actually saying these things for real. And this is about a chat that I was

having with a friend who works in market research, and he's pretty high, and he's done an awful lot

of research in the automotive world. And one of the interesting things that he points out is that

for all the differentiation that Stellantis is doing belatedly in some cases on its brands

which it insists on calling brands constantly the Dodge brand, the Jeep brand, the Ram brand

which is another story in another video, but it is ridiculous because we all know them as Jeep

Dodge, and Ram. We don't have to have our noses rubbed into the fact that they're just nameplates

owned by Stellantis, especially since Stellantis doesn't actually do any advertising about Stellantis. Point is that he was looking at the current marketing and whatever else you can

say about it. One thing you got to admit is they don't talk a lot about quality. They talk sometimes

about toughness, but usually it's in a sort of machismo way. Like everything that we do has V8s

Yay! Durango's V8 only. Yay! And this all comes when customers are really getting more and more

concerned about long-term longevity and durability of their vehicles, which comes down to quality

And are they marketing that? They really aren't. And I know that one reason is because a lot of

people would laugh at them, but just remember, I worked for Ford at a Ford factory. When they were

doing Ford's job one, and you were lucky if your escort could make it to 80,000 miles, or your

temple, if you remember them. So when I talk about companies that are not making a quality product

but have their motto, quality is job one, I know what I'm talking about

The point is, is that customers really want quality above all. After quality, you get your other differentiators

And this is for most customers. There are always those who will say, yes, I know, but I still love my Jeep or Fiat or whatever

because of fill in the blank here. But the typical buyer, the ones who flock to Hondas and Toyotas

and to a slightly lesser degree to Chevys, they're looking for quality

And if you wonder why the Chevy Yukon and Suburban in Tahoe, I know one of those is a GMC

If you're wondering why those are perennially the best sellers in the big SUV market by far

the answer is because they've proven themselves. Durability and quality are taken for granted, even by people, in my experience

even by people who would not even think of buying an American car

but they will buy a big Chevy SUV. So what's the first thing that Mary Barrett did at GM

She started working on quality and GM got to the point where they're number one or number two on

the JD Power short term medium term and long term studies which is great You know I applaud an American automaker who can reach the top of the quality charts but Stellantis needs to be there too They got to climb up from the bottom and go up to the top

And Stellantis isn't necessarily making a bad product, but people think they are

And that's really the problem. And why do they think they are? Maybe because Stellantis doesn't actually tell us that they're making good products and show us how they're improving it

And they don't really address problems that turn up very rapidly, do they

I mean, the 4xe battery is dying. How long does it take to fix that problem, or at least to diagnose it quickly at the dealership

so that they can quickly slam another battery in there and get you out? And this is a big problem because durability and quality, those are huge factors in how

people actually buy cars. Not what people say they consider when they buy cars, but what people actually consider

as measured statistically. Those are the big differentiators. And once you have those, then you can have more power or more luxury, sportier image and all that

That all comes afterwards. Otherwise, you're fighting in an area where you have to be good on price for whatever it is that you're marketing on

Dodge cannot come out with an average performing car. They have to outperform everybody else for the price because they don't have that reputation for quality where it should be

Ram, which traditionally has had a very good quality, which traditionally was top of the charts

they have to fight because they've lost the reputation that they had, whether for good

reasons or for bad reasons. And the same goes for Chrysler with the minivans. There was no excuse

for letting those plug-in hybrid problems drag on and drag down their quality ratings, but they did

it. Chrysler should find it easy to sell minivans. They should always be number one in minivans. It

is the Chrysler thing. It's also the only thing that they make now. So they should be top of the

charts. They shouldn't have to be fighting it out with Kia, for heaven's sake. And they shouldn't

have to be fighting it out with Honda or Toyota. But this is why Toyota, when you go to a Toyota

dealer, sometimes you have to wait online for your Corolla or your Camry or your RAV4 or whatever

This is why. This is why they didn't have to chop their prices out to get rid of inventory. You

never hear of Toyota's being sold at $15,000 below list because there's always somebody there

because the reputation for quality is there. Yes, they screw up, but they own up to it usually

And they almost always own up to it and they fix it. That's the important thing. With Cylantis

under Tavares, we had the problem where they screwed up, but they didn't own up to it. They

didn't fix it. Even today with the Pentastar issues, I don't think that the Pentastar problems

are common. I think the Pentastar is still a damn good engine. I think it's very reliable

I think it's very durable. But when problems come up, no matter how small they are and they start

making their way through YouTube and social media, you have to step out in front and you have to

address it And they really haven done that When they came out with their repair kits for those engines that had certain problems with camshaft wear they didn tell us exactly what they did to fix the problem

That should have been front and center. That should have been right at the top of the press

release. We had a problem. Here's what it is. Here was our fix. We fixed it. Now you can go out and

buy a new engine. You don't have to worry about it. And the result is that you see people on social

media bad-mouthing it. And I'm pretty sure they fixed whatever problems it might have had. I'm

pretty sure that its problems were relatively low in terms of percentage of vehicles affected

Doesn't matter. Once the perception's out there, it's out there, and you have to address it one way

or the other. You go back to Johnson & Johnson. Remember when somebody was poisoning little

bottles of Tylenol 20, 30 years ago? That was back when Johnson & Johnson still owned Tylenol

before they sold it off. But when J&J had this incident, they were not at all to blame

Nobody at Johnson & Johnson had anything to do with it, but they stood up on a national stage

and they said, somebody's poisoning our product and here's what we're going to do about it

They stepped in front, they handled the problem publicly, and it disappeared. And it's not enough

therefore, just to work on the quality problems behind the scenes. Because first of all, there's

years before work behind the scenes shows up in different ratings, and second, because it's just

not enough to alter the perception. I mean, Ford, that whole quality is job one campaign, it was

brilliant because quality was never really the key priority for Ford in those days. Believe me

it wasn't. Job one is when you start production of a new car, and that's when most of the

improvements that they had slated for the Escort were scheduled to take place. Not right away

but job one we'll fix it on job one we'll fix it when we stop making escorts and we start making

mazdas and putting the word escort onto it now of course one problem is that you've got 14 brands

although that's not true you know in any particular country you've probably got three to five main

brands but even then it's hard to get your message about quality across because most people don't

know or care what Stellantis is in the United States they don't even have it as a company it's

FCA US still. So here in the United States, they would have to make the case for Dodge

Jeep, Ram, and Chrysler improving quality because it's FCA US or Stellantis. They've never

synchronized those things. And what is Stellantis? I mean, really, how many people actually know that

Stellantis makes Jeep, Dodge, Ram, and Chrysler? And do they want to emphasize that group belonging

The point is that IACO could go on TV and talk about Chrysler quality improving

and the people who knew that the three brands were all Chrysler would be impacted, and the people who just thought about Chrysler is lousy because they're going out of business

those people would get the message that Chrysler had higher quality. And back then, a lot of people still thought that, you know, Plymouth, isn't that made by General Motors

Isn the Chrysler one Pontiac you know people ordinary people often didn have a clue Today most ordinary people don have a clue that Stellantis is a thing which makes it kind of hard if you going to base everything on Stellantis improving quality

But none of them seem to really be focusing on quality as something that they have to improve anyway

Ram probably comes the closest, but Dodge, Jeep, and Chrysler, they got to focus on

OK, we've made some mistakes. You all know it. Nobody doesn't know this by now

but here's what we're doing to make quality better, and then they actually have to do it

And part of that has to do with something that I haven't heard anything about from anybody at

Atlantis in years, and that's the organizational culture, because that was what made them work in

the 90s. That's what made them profitable out of almost dying in the late 80s, early 90s

to actually being incredibly profitable in the mid to late 90s, making gobs of money

attracting new customers, having higher customer loyalty, being able to raise their prices

being able to make money off compact cars. All of these things are because they changed the culture

And I haven't heard word one about that. But then again, I haven't heard them talk very much about

quality either. So what we really need is we need them to go back to emphasizing quality

And they've made a lot of steps internally that you don't see about it, right? So they've brought

a lot of the engineering back to the United States that they had in low-cost countries

And that's good. They've had people working out of the CTC and meeting each other and all that

which is good. I mean, when Tavares brought them back to the CTC to stay on Zoom meetings or

Teams meetings or whatever with people all around the world, that was meaningless. But if they're

going to be working together in the same place, that's a good thing. They have done a lot of work

on not being quite so stingy for pennies that they lose out on dollars, which is great

They've still got the damage of the charger and the Wagoneer S being brought out way too early

but that can be worked on. They really need to communicate this stuff, though. It's not enough

to send out technical service bulletins to dealerships. If you really want to convince

people that you're improving quality, you have to tell people what you're doing. You can't just do

it in a back room in quiet and hope that some days people will notice because by then you might not

be here anymore. They need to make it public. They need to tell us what they're doing as they're

doing it. They need to share more. Original Chrysler did it back in the 90s. It worked great

Not everybody believed it all the time, but their sales shot up and so did their profits

Anyway, keeping in mind that I was an organizational development consultant for most of my life

and I have taken all these classes and got advanced training in all these topics

And then I'm working with somebody who is really a whiz at marketing and market research and has worked with all the major automakers

I think maybe if the two of us agree on this, we're probably right

I'll see you soon