Car trim levels have always been the trick of the marketer, and the one I have noticed the most—probably because of its huge range in the UK—is that of Ford. Many car nuts my age can rattle off the Escort Mk II trim levels of base, Popular, Popular L, L, GL, S and Ghia, and Mexico and RS2000—letters or words that denoted how well equipped a car was, even if, fundamentally, they all looked roughly the same and they all went equally fast. Unless you opted for a bigger or smaller engine. But you were buying an Escort for three reasons: you were a fleet manager, you were a private buyer who conformed, or you wanted to relive either Doyle off The Professionals or successful European or Mexican rallies.
   Back in those days, they made some sense, mostly by counting the number of letters used. Nowadays, they seem harder to follow, because people do not wish to be separated by trim levels any more. Chevrolet followed such a course with one of the last Camaros: if you didn’t go for a Z-28, you weren’t treated (by pony car standards) as a pauper. The public tended to find it harder to separate if you had gone with the cheap model, or a high-line one.
   This is a reflection of how we don’t appreciate trim-level snobbery any more: that the person who buys a Focus Platinum deserves as much respect as someone who has a regular Focus. Both look pretty good—the base Focus no longer appears stripped-down from the outside. But Ford’s trim names are particularly tricky now.
   There is a trim level called Zetec, named after a type of engine Ford used. In the case of the old Mondeo, it denoted a model that did not have a Zetec engine.
   There is a trim level called Ghia, a car design studio in Torino. In the case of most Fords, it denotes a model that has no connection with the Ghia studios.
   The Renault Scénic, not officially the Mégane Scénic as it was at launch, still bears a little Mégane legend in the B-pillar, so why not refer to the Mégane heritage?
   At Holden, the new Commodore has a trim level called Omega, which is also the model name it will have in Brazil; and the intermediate model continues to be called Berlina, but it is, according to the badging not a Commodore Berlina—the name it once possessed in the mid-1980s. To an Italian, Berlina Wagon seems contradictory. To the neophyte, the names are meaningless because (s)he does not know if the car is well equipped or not.
   I don’t really enjoy this confusion, and I wonder if these tricky names mean anything to twenty-first-century consumers. But since we no longer go for separating cars with L and GL these days, it is no wonder we have gone for names instead—names that are incomprehensible to all but the dealer and the car nut.
   There has to be a better way to inform consumers. Sure, there’s the web search, which most people will do when car-shopping. Comparing trim levels between models is laborious and the tables are usually biased, anyway, if you see them in an ad or brochure.
   Is it time to reintroduce the easy-to-understand trim level codes again—we can count letters like kids counted portholes in Buicks—or have we moved well beyond that in 2006? Do we shout simplicity: offer one trim, well equipped?
   That theory does not really wash as people are very affected by prices in this business. But pretentious names, to me, don’t sound like informing the consumer that well, either. Posted by Jack Yan, 13:24  permalink

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