If Justice System Can Say “Life” And Not Mean It, Why Not Vauxhall?
Vauxhall–Opel has turned a great marketing idea into a public relations disaster. The European subsidiary of General Motors realised that Hyundai and Kia were making huge inroads into their sales by offering fabulous guarantees. Kia’s is particularly mouth-watering – 7 years or 100,000 miles for most expensive items that might go wrong.
Toyota has quietly raised its guarantee to 5 years.
Vauxhall-Opel though decided to beat that, and trump Kia. That’s great news for car buyers. But the company has allowed the marketing men to over-reach themselves with the most ludicrous, transparent hyperbole. The tassle-shoed ones describe the guarantee as for life, which the media immediately added the quotes as in “life” as you do when you use a word that doesn’t mean what it says. Clearly, everyone watching the ad on TV or reading in a newspaper will see through this right away. It’s 100,000 miles. That’s not a lifetime. Also the guarantee only applies to the first buyer of the car. It is not automatically transferred when you sell the car like Kia’s.
Vauxhall in Britain has compounded this childish error by employing lefty pea-brain actor Bill Nighy to mouth this obvious canard. The TV ad itself now says “a guarantee that could last a lifetime”. Why not be straight with people and treat them like intelligent adults?
This is almost as exasperating as Nissan’s insistence on saying its Leaf electric car has “zero emissions”, when they’ve simply transferred them from the car to the power station, and reminds me of Toby Young’s book “How to lose friends and alienate people”. I suppose this can all be blamed on our criminal-friendly legal system. We all know that when a guilty murderer gets “life”, this doesn’t mean that he will stay in prison for “life”, so maybe Vauxhall thinks the word has lost all meaning.
Neil Winton – August 15, 2010
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