Tu vuo fa l’americano

I’d like to suggest you the following reading about Fiat, Chrysler and the American dream… afterwards I got much better what does branding mean.

Reference: [Salon.com] – [Greatcarstv.com]

In June, Fiat took control of Chrysler, the once mighty Detroit company that currently reposes on blocks, its precious fluids drained and tires removed, in that ever expanding vacant lot known as bankruptcy…

…But a much more serious problem looms: the potentially deflating effects on 100 million American men of outsourcing their sexual self-image to a company whose most famous product was known as the “little mouse”….

…Ever since the first American car clanked off an assembly line, American males have been programmed to associate virility with large, overpowered steel-and-chrome automobiles, preferably adorned with tumescent hood ornaments and protruding, D-cup-size bumper boobs. Buffeted by divorce, feminism, potbellies, a useless repertoire of lame pickup lines and the thousand other natural shocks that flesh is heir to, the long-suffering American male has always known he could find solace in the long, rigid-chassis object reposing in his garage. Indeed, only their function as a kind of auxiliary national phallus can explain why Detroit’s gas-guzzling dinosaurs have survived as long as they have…

…Nor is Fiat’s recent history any more encouraging. Fiat’s one entry into the U.S. market was a debacle, memorialized mainly by the unkind crack that the company’s name stood for “Fiat: Fix It Again, Tony”.…

…It’s all about perspective. For Fiat’s puny 500, the famous Cinquecento, a car so tiny and light that three men could pick it up and move it, may be an anti-aphrodisiac for American men, but for an entire generation of Italians, it was literally sex on wheels. In Italy’s postwar era, as the nation pulled itself out of poverty, destruction, hunger and despair, the ubiquitous 500 represented not just freedom, mobility and the promise of a better life, but an opportunity for young Italians to get out of mama’s house, park somewhere dark, put newspapers over the windows, crawl into its cramped interior, and begin the backbreaking process of increasing Italy’s population…

…While Americans may have their doubts about the sexiness of Italian cars (leaving aside the Alfa and the Ferrari), they have no such misgivings about the sexiness of Italians themselves. Properly marketed, Fiat could appeal to the latent desires of American men to be Marcello Mastroianni and American women to be Monica Vitti. I can see a glossy full-pager of two shapely Italian legs sticking out a newspaper-covered Fiat 500 window at an improbable angle, with the slogan below: “Fiat: Fun Inside All the Time!”…

…OK, this would mean handing over a big piece of our national sexual imagery to a bunch of foreigners. But if it saves American jobs and pumps up American libidos, what patriot would shrink from the sacrifice? Let the mouse from Turin roar!…