This blog is one of ten or twelve about branding an auto dealership contributed by members of the Branding Wire posse of branding bloggers. My take is that without a change of business model and mind set, auto dealers will always lack credibility when stating that they are “differnet”.

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Today’s news: Rupert Murdoch is about to acquire Dow-Jones and the Wall Street Journal. He claims there won’t be any change in the editorial approach or content for the WSJ. OK, I take him at his word. But in the minds of readers and observers, will the Journal lose credibility just because of the association [...]

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There are several situations that require a brand manager to review and reevaluate the brand. Quite often this is an activity dictated by an unexpected event or circumstance which intuitively calls for the review. These often occur because of competitive activity, particularly when inytroducing a technologically superior product. The event may also be something as [...]

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Just because they’re introducing a new approach to presenting price/tradein/financing options to a buyer doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to change the name of the business. There’s a host of expense and planning required to change the name (and probably some trade dress as well) for over 250 dealerships. No, I suspect AutoNation [...]

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As reported earlier, AutoNation and John Elway are parting company in the Denver market. In that blog I speculated that Mr. Elway probably wanted more than AutoNation was prepared to pay to license the 17 dealerships they own that carry the marque name of Elway. Seems the real story is a little different: Elway wanted [...]

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Here in Denver, Colorado, we have a sports hero/legend who’s still revered by Bronco fans: John Elway. During his playing career, he purchased several auto dealerships and appended a new brand to each: John Elway Toyota, John Elway Chevrolet, etc.. In 1997, Republic Industries purchased the Elway franchise, and in 1999 as AutoNation, purchased another [...]

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