Quote:
Originally Posted by DrivenByE30
...the 6 series 4-door is not a simple sedan like the 5 series...it's a Gran Coupe
which one you prefer to have ??
A sedan ? or a Gran Coupe ??
That's what i thought....This is much more than an exercise of marketing, it's psychology my friend!
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It's a sedan in exactly the same way a 3, 5 or 7 is a sedan. It has four doors. That it's swoopy looking just makes it a more attractive sedan (to some eyes, certainly mine). I might prefer it to BMW's other sedan offerings because it's better looking, not because they call it a gran coupe. (And whose dumb idea was it to give a German car a French name that most Americans can't correctly pronounce anyway?)
It's the marketing I take issue with, not the car or its looks. The marketing is insulting. Consider the following:
You might want to sell pillows, for example. You stuff them with eider duck down and market it as being an eider down pillow. That sounds as though I'm getting something special, despite the fact that it's still just duck feathers, and I would feel better having "eider down" pillows than I would having "duck down" pillows. But that doesn't really insult anyone's intelligence; we all know that eider ducks are still just ducks. It's not as though you are putting fish scales, or horse hair inside the pillow and trying to market it to me as though it's down pillow.
Similarly, a car shouldn't be called a coupe just because it has beautiful lines. I can look at the car and see it has beautiful lines and judge for myself whether I would like to own it, regardless of what they call it. I don't care if they call it an ass crack on wheels, I'll still say it looks good if it does.
But it's not savvy, vehicularlly aware consumers like you and me for whom I'm making this argument. If one's never seen it before, yet sees/hears the name, one expects to see a car with two doors. If what one wants is a two door car, one's likely to be ticked off upon seeing it has four doors. Wanting a four door car, one probably won't investigate it further, thinking a coupe has two doors.
Now you might think I'm being hypothetical with my example, but I'm not. My aged (76) uncle rang me to ask what car I recommended for him. (He's been driving E and S Class MBs for the past 35+ years.)
I said go check out the BMW gran coupe and his reply was, "Oh, no, I want a four door car." I gave him the 411 on the car and he maintained, "There's still something fishy going on with them calling a four door car a coupe. It takes gall to call a sedan a coupe when you can see isn't. I don't want it. If they'll lie about whether the car is a sedan or coupe, there's no telling what else they'll lie about. I'm not fool enough to get involved with people like that." That's what the man said to me.
Now I know if he bothered to look at the car, he'd instantly love it and he'd want, but for his distrust of BMW, to buy it on sight. And the only thing making him distrust BMW is the marketing. He knows I buy BMWs and that I am very happy with them. He simply doesn't trust companies that are less than candid/clear about their products.
So he'll buy something else instead, certainly not a BMW, simply because he doesn't trust them as a company at this point, whereas until I mentioned that sedan called a coupe, he was at least neutral on BMW. And, given the car industry's history of misrepresentation, obfuscation, and stone walling when they have really goofed, I can't legitimately blame him. (I didn't tell him about the CLS lest he think MB are up to the same shenanigans.)