Re: Did the public think of Imperial as Packard's replacement?

Posted by Rusty O\'Toole On 2009/8/4 16:08:29

Funny thing is, Packard went up market by dropping their six cylinder models while Cadillac went down by offering the B body model 61.

I do agree that the Clipper body was a little small for a luxury car especially after Cadillac introduced their new style for 1948. Packard didn't have anything similar until 1951.

The top brass seemed to neglect the senior cars until it was too late. They always seemed to be trying to catch up with what Cadillac did 3 or 4 years ago.

I still think Cadillac did a masterfull job of building up the Cadillac image while Packard rested on their laurels.

For example, Cadillac was careful to build slightly fewer cars than they could sell. This made Cadillacs hard to get and of course, all the more desirable. It also kept resale and trade in values high. This was an important incentive. When a Cadillac owner could trade his car in every year or 2 for little or no depreciation of course this made it easy to sell the Caddy owner a new car.

In the end this restricted supply actually sold more cars.

Another masterpiece of image building was the Cadillac/Winston jewellers advertising campaign. It said nothing about the cars, it had nothing to do with the cars, it planted the idea of a Cadillac being the ultimate success symbol.

A Cadillac insider at the time admitted their advertising had nothing to do with selling cars. It was aimed at flattering Cadillac owners. Those owners then sold the cars.