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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (438609)	12/5/2008 8:13:09 PM
From: Alighieri	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1586012

I think this is more PR (or bad PR for US companies) than reality. It doesn't matter ... look, do you have kids...teenagers? OK...chances are that if you do, you can relate to the fact that today most teens won't buy clothes unless they come from a name brand store like the gap, or american eagle outfitters or some such name brand. The clothes are three time more expensive there than they are at Walmart, but not really much better...still they won't wear anything else. That's marketing and mindshare. The Japanese car makers have gone roughly through the following mindshare phases...crap and cheap, better crap still cheap, quality but not cool and moderately priced, quality and cool and moderately expensive. Do you want an example? Price a Honda Civic. The Korean are going through that process now too. The European were always generally quality and cool and expensive, with some exceptions, like VW for example. Think mind share now, not reality...after the supercar phase of the 60s ended because of pricey gas, the big 3 never got the message, didn't get past quality and they never got back to cool. Until detroit fixes that problem, it will have trouble growing and selling its cars profitably, because their competitors will be able to match them blow for blow. They have to get to where more of their customers want to buy their cars because they prefer the brand, not out of patriotic obligation, or because they are on sale, or better in only one of the many ways a car is judged...Olds and Buick used to have that 'je ne sais quoi" many years ago...not any more. Al