Auto-Eratica. Tone-deaf and design-tardy is in Detroit's DNA

I've been trying to lay low during the recent unpleasantness since there's not much to say that hasn't been ranted already around here. For those interested, there is this pseudo-analysis a few years back - Disney bought Pixar, why shouldn't GM buy Target? Not much that's changed from that post's assessment except that Detroit is joined by Wall Street in their Denial of Death march. And yeah, that pre-emptive wake is covered in 80% of Wall Street stays obtuse.

But hey, far more interesting is some neat historical automotive stuff bubbling up from The Atlantic. They're reprising a 1955 article from mid-20th century industrial design icon, Raymond Loewy (wiki).

....The automobile is an American cultural symbol.

"Some culture," one might say as one watches the sad parade of the 1955 models. The world will soon forget that under these gaudy shells are concealed masterpieces of inspired technology. What we see today looks more like an orgiastic chrome plated brawl.

What a phrase! And the whole piece is well worth the read. Loewy's talking about the galumphing cars of Happy Days and Beaver Cleaver, but cars do get approved, guided and pimped by management, and that's a freekin great analogy for the structure and unearned-pomp of the 2008 companies themselves. And Loewy's orgiastic chrome plated brawl continues until the light bill can't be paid. The Frog and the scorpion, you know?

Loewy, like many designers, intuits the future well. And tragically, like many designers, he inhabits the brain hemisphere that garners little motivational respect from the organization men who need his crystal ball most. Later in the article...

Progressive management may [yet] realize that it is losing contact with a segment of consumers and that, however spectacular the sales, the company is losing popularity. This unpopularity has not yet reduced sales. But I think resentment is growing. And resentment is never an asset.

The public may admire a corporation for its impressive size. Who in the United States doesn't? But when a business, however gigantic, gets smug enough to believe that it is sufficient only to match competition on trivial points instead of leading competition in valid matters, that business is becoming vulnerable to public disfavor.

That Raymond, so 2008.

All this brought to mind another glimpse back at a similar rage against the machine that makes the machines, one familiar to those of us who've done time pitching horsepower and barcaloungers with wheels.

Fast forward a few years from Loewy of '55 and we get Fred Manley and Hal Riney, San Francisco ad legends. Manley the Suit, and Riney the Art Director gave an urgent presentation on the problems with the youthful "cleverness" that was pervading, nay, infecting the advertising of 1963, particularly the automotive kind.

See, the problem was that the younger generation of ad people didn't get it, nor their place. They couldn't know what the future looked like. They needed to know that you have to walk before you run. Well, Fred and Hal had some old rules to replace these upstart new rules and, dammit!, we were going to listen up in 9 Ways to Improve an Ad (1.8 MB pdf), clumsily scanned from my 1988 Communication Arts.

Verily, there's so much we can learn from our elders and their management expertise. There are ways of doing things and considerations that must be made: Don't be brash. Respect the old order. Steady as she goes. And, as the below snip of Fred's presentation attests: If you have no news, bluff.