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

Tue Mar 14 11:34:38 PST 2000

   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 --

Santa Barbara
Permaculture Network
224 E. Figueroa St, #C
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
805/962-2571
sbpcnet at silcom.com  
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