Source:  Mother Jones, July 1999 v24 i4 p73.

                                                                             

    Title:  The Hidden Life of SUVs.(social impressions of people who drive

            sport-utility vehicles)

   Author:  Jack Hitt

                                                                             

Subjects:  Sport-utility vehicles - Social aspects

            Marketing - Social aspects

                                                                             

  Magazine Collection:  99E3422

Electronic Collection:  A55090357

                   RN:  A55090357

                                                                             

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Foundation for National Progress

They're built to go off-road, but what kind of landscape are they really

designed to conquer?

What's in a name? What do you make of a passenger vehicle called a Bronco?

Or one dubbed a Cherokee? How about a Wrangler? Are they just chrome- plated

expressions of sublimated testosterone flooding the highways? Check out the

herd that grazes the average car lot these days: Blazer, Tracker, Yukon,

Navigator, Tahoe, Range Rover, Explorer, Mountaineer, Denali, Expedition,

Discovery, Bravada. Besides signaling that we're not Civic or Gallant, they

indicate there's something else going on here.

These are, of course, all names of sport utility vehicles, the miracle that

has resurrected Motown. Think back to the dark days of the previous decade

when the Japanese auto industry had nearly buried Detroit. In 1981, only a

relative handful of four-wheel-drives traveled the road, and the phrase "sport

utility vehicle" hadn't entered the language. Today, they number more than 14

million, and that figure is growing fast. If you include pickups and vans,

then quasi trucks now constitute about half of all the vehicles sold in

America. Half. They're rapidly displacing cars on the highways of our new

unbraking economy.

Go to any car lot and jawbone with a salesman, and you'll find that big is

once again better. Any savvy dealer (clutching his copy of Zig Ziglar's Ziglar

on Selling) will try to talk you up to one of the latest behemoths, which have

bloated to such Brobdingnagian dimensions as to have entered the realm of the

absurd.

Ford, in fact, has unveiled a new monster, the Excursion, due to hit the

showrooms before the millennium. With a corporate straight face, its

literature touts as selling points that the Excursion is "less than 7 feet

tall...and less than 20 feet long" and is "more fuel efficient...than two

average full-size sedans."

These Big Berthas have even spawned new vocabulary words. The biggest of the

big, for instance, can no longer fit comfortably in a standard- size garage or

the average parking space. So salesmen will often sell you on one of the

"smaller" SUVs by praising its "garageability."

What, then, explains the inexorable advance of these giant SUVs into our

lives? Why do we want cars that are, in fact, high-clearance trucks with

four-wheel drive, an optional winch, and what amounts to a cowcatcher?

The answer, in part, lies in the vehicles themselves. Cars are not fickle

fashions. They are the most expensive and visible purchases in an economy

drenched in matters of status and tricked out with hidden meanings.

Some people will tell you that the shift from car to truck can be explained

simply: We Americans are getting, um, bigger in the beam. We aren't

comfortable in those Camrys, so we trade up to a vehicle we can sit in without

feeling scrunched. Here's a new buzzword for Ziglar disciples: fatassability.

But I think the key is found not so much in their size or expense (although

both keep ballooning) but in those ersatz Western names. The other day, I saw

an acquaintance of mine in a boxy steed called a Durango. Say it out loud for

me: "Durango." Can you get the syllables off your tongue without irony? In the

post-"Seinfeld" era, can anyone say Durango without giving it an Elaine Benes

enunciation at every syllable? Doo-RANG-Go.

The true irony comes from the fact that this thoroughly market- researched

word no longer has any core meaning. No one comprehends its denotation

(Colorado town) but only its vague connotations (rugged individualism, mastery

over the wilderness, cowboy endurance). The word does not pin down meaning so

much as conjure up images.

These names are only the end product of the intense buyer-profiling that the

car companies and the marketing firms continuously carry out. By the time they

make it to the lot, these cars are streamlined Frankensteinian concoctions of

our private anxieties and desires. We consumers don't so much shop for one of

these SUVs as they shop for us.

A typical focus-group study might be one like the "cluster analysis" conducted

by college students for Washington, D.C.-area car dealers in 1994 and reported

in Marketing Tools. The analysts coordinated numerous databases, mail surveys,

and census information to profile the typical "Bill and Barb Blazers," whose

consumer apprehensions can shift from block to block, but can be pinpointed

down to the four-digit appendix on the old zip code.

Each Bill and Barb then got tagged as "Young Suburbia" or "Blue-Collar

Nursery" or "Urban Gentry." Translation, respectively: "college- educated,

upwardly mobile white" or "middle-class, small-town" or "educated black"

people. The students next identified what images spoke to the underlying

appeal of an SUV for each group (prestige, child space, weekend leisure). Then

they developed targeted ads to run in the media most favored by each group:

the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Black Entertainment Television.

Many of the ads they developed were directed at women. For example, the one

meant for upscale homeowners depicted a "woman architect standing next to her

four-door [Blazer] at a Washington-area construction site" and "conveyed her

professional leadership in a city with one of the highest rates of labor force

participation for women."

Sport utility vehicles are quickly becoming women's cars. In fact, current

statistics show that 40 percent of all SUV sales are to women, and the

proportion is growing. (More men, on the other hand, are buying bigger,

tougher pickup trucks.) But one wonders what's going on in the mind of that

female architect or that soccer mom, high above the world in her soundproof,

tinted-glass SUV, chatting on her cellular phone as she steers her mobile

fortress down the street.

When GMC decided to launch the Denali (an SUV named for the Alaskan mountain),

the auto-trade papers discussed the subtleties of that outdoorsy name: Even

though most buyers "will never venture into territory any less trampled than

the local country club parking lot," wrote Ward's Auto World, "the important

goal of the Denali marketing hype is to plant the image in customers' minds

that they can conquer rugged terrain. The metaphor of Alaska is particularly

apt because SUVs, especially the larger of the species, depend on the myth

that we have new frontiers yet to pave. Perhaps we're trying to tame a

different kind of wilderness. Indeed, in an age of gated communities the SUV

is the perfect transportation shelter to protect us from fears both real and

imagined."

In one focus group, female drivers confessed they hesitated even to exit the

interstate "because they are afraid of what they are going to find on some

surface streets."

G. Clotaire Rapaille, a French medical anthropologist and student of the

consumer mind, practices a more advanced marketing technique called "archetype

research." In one session he has consumers lie on the floor and lulls them

into a relaxed alpha state with soothing music. Then he asks them to

free-associate from images of different vehicle designs and write stories

about what they hoped the design would become. Overwhelmingly, Rapaille told

the Wall Street Journal, his participants had the same reaction: "It's a

jungle out there. It's Mad Max. People want to kill me, rape me. Give me a big

thing like a tank."

More and more, SUVs give us that tanklike security, and part of the feeling

derives from their literal altitude. Down there is the old working class, the

new peasants who haven't figured out how to snatch a six-figure income out of

our roaring economy-the little people who don't own a single Fidelity fund.

There's a brutal Darwinian selection at work: They huddle down in their

wretched Escorts and their Metros- not merely because they are poor but

because they deserve to be.

These are the new savages: people who drive cars. They scrape and fetch about

in their tiny compacts, scuttling along on surface streets. But above it all,

in their gleaming, skyscraping vehicles, is the new high society-the

ambitious, the exurban pioneers, the downtown frontiersmen.

It's been said that the most distinctive feature of the American character is

that we continually define ourselves as pilgrims facing a new frontier. In

their darkest hearts, the members of the new-money bourgeoisie have convinced

themselves that we live in an unforgiving wilderness of marauders and brutes.

The hidden meaning of our new conveyances can be found right on the surface.

Once upon a time, Trailblazers, Explorers, and Trackers tamed the Wild West.

Now, through the sorcery of focus groups, the bull-market gentry have brought

the Pathfinders and Mountaineers back into their lives in the belief that they

need to conquer the savage land one more time.

                                                                             

                                -- End --