news How Car Companies Decide You’ll Ride a Mustang or Catch a Tiguan

[GoKaizen]

One obstacle that branding experts in the car industry — and their clients — face is the dwindling number of names that are still free to be trademarked.

Some carmakers — the Germans, in particular — opt to avoid the game by using alphanumeric names, like the BMW 328i and M5, the Mercedes-Benz GLA250, the Volvo S90. This can sometimes lead to confusion for Audi shoppers, who may struggle to keep straight the differences among the A3, the S3 and the RS3, or between the Q5 and the SQ5.

Mr. Placek said he tried to avoid what he called “alphabet soup.”

“There’s no memorability, and they’re hard to process,” he said

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/business/car-names-how.html

 

[offthehandle]

Good article and a variety of differing opinions from branding “experts”. Tiger-Iguana? Needed to look that one up. I don't pay attention to car market at all, never heard of the car model or name. So goo gled "tiguan". VW's website or ad's comes up first, great. vw. com/models/tiguan/, nice fancy splash page, as expected.

Then, thought I'd check out their "tiguan . com" website. So I try 3 different older browsers- same result- a dead page. Direct type in to tiguan .com, and nothing. No page, no photos. It redirects to tiguan. volkswagen. com/start.html- never to the nice VW page.

Thinking well it's my older browser, Go to Windows 10 and latest version of firefox, nothing still. Maybe it's an issue as a new model is being introduced for 2018. Archive seems spotty though.

So decided to look into this further for historical use of the domain name. Look it up archive and see it was first registered and redirected, seems to remain that way. Like to various subdomain locations historically like early on: to tiguan. volkswagen.com /de/ de/ home.html, then
read some more: https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/volkswagen/tiguan/prices "Right now, the Volkswagen Tiguan is the slowest selling compact SUV".

Find it funny though a missed opportunity not to have a website with a splash page using the domain name and all sorts of glossy bright photos. Tiguan .com so much for the value of the domain name to VW. The direct type ins are 360K per month too according to KWfinder. Plus other extended keywords, many more. But search has VW and it's other pages at the top, so they really don't need the domain name it seems to me also.

I look whoxy and only history to VW 3 years back, says registered in 2005, and archives records show to like 2007. VW and their whois representive corp guy on record Uwe has 2500+ names registered under their corp. They own VW .com.

So look into Jetta .com just for the heck of it. It resolves to an IT Company instead.
"Passat .com"- redirects to volkswagen.com/en.html showing a "Golf" model.
Scirocco .com does not resolve at all. A domainer co owns it, since 1997.

Then back to the Tiguan, I notice googles results change as they do and near the top the Reuters headline:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...n-for-seat-belt-issue-statement-idUSKBN1F1229

"The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Friday it has opened a preliminary investigation into whether seat belts on new 2018 Volkswagen Tiguan sport utility vehicles could fail during a crash."

So, I thnking about this a lost opportunity- see the marketing and customer perception could be enhanced away from the latest news, simply by having a flashy website ranking up there under the domain, instead of the latest news report about seatbeats. I'd fire the ad or web agency.

Ever heard of a Touareg? That's one of their models.

 

[GoKaizen]

Then they aren't good car names.

Good article and a variety of differing opinions from branding “experts”. Tiger-Iguana? Needed to look that one up. I don't pay attention to car market at all, never heard of the car model or name.

 

[offthehandle]

Then they aren't good car names.

I can’t disagree, from a US consumer perspective but other non english speakers probably less impact. I’ve seen plenty dropping weird names this past year. Its fun to review. Somehow the Italians seem to have complicated yet cool sounding names. I don’t think I ever typed Lamborghini before anywhere until just now. Ferrari which is also not intuitive in spelling. BMW Bavarian Motor Werks/works at least was simplified to an acronym.