Never Drive and Read New-Car Brochures

By CATHY CURTIS

April 26, 2000 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Do you need a sport-utility vehicle with 10 tie-down hooks and clips for stashing duffel bags, oars and wetsuits?

Or are you more interested in a minivan “known in parenting circles as ‘the peacekeeper’ ”?

Would “3.5 liters of rocket science” in “the world’s first all-road high-performance sports vehicle” rev up your pulse?

Or perhaps you lust after a luxury car that “quietly observes, takes notes and makes adjustments. The way we all would, in an ideal world.”

Automotive brochures are an intoxicating mix of enticing descriptions--as evidenced by the come-ons cited above for the Nissan Xterra, Nissan Quest, Isuzu VehiCROSS and Mercedes-Benz S-Class--and luscious photos.

Leafing through the glossy pages, you can give free rein to fantasy. Cars pose in dramatic relief against sunset backdrops or whiz through empty, rain-slick city streets illuminated by futuristic flashes of colored light. Trucks plow sturdily through forbiddingly rugged terrain. The only thing missing in these perfect pictures is you, proudly steering into the unknown.

But the seductions of today’s brochures are such that you may wonder whether they help you make wise choices. If all you had to go on were sober rows of facts and figures, maybe you’d never be tempted into buying a hunk of steel that strokes your ego while emptying your purse. Can the marketing professionals who slice and dice us into demographics based on age, income level and preferred activities actually have a positive influence on our buying behavior?

Not surprisingly, the marketing wizards at Designory Inc.--a 30-year-old Long Beach design firm whose clients include Nissan, Isuzu and Mercedes-Benz--strongly believe that the brochures they turn out are genuinely useful to consumers.

“Advertising is about getting your attention,” said Lynne Lee Grigg, senior creative director. “But once we have your attention, [the brochure] is really going to help determine what you ultimately purchase, and [that you] feel good about it once you’ve purchased it.

“I think consumers go by gut, and if there’s something we can do to contribute to making them feel this is a really quality vehicle, or superior in some way, it adds to the emotional attachment. . . . You want to have some rational backup, and the more we can provide, along with this emotional enticement, the better.”

Designory specializes in auto brochures and other marketing “collateral,” including the banners and kiosks at dealerships. When the firm is commissioned to create materials for a specific vehicle, it focuses on developing “the story,” a simple narrative with a catchy title (printed on the brochure cover) that sums up whatever the manufacturer believes to be the major selling point.

A brochure may include “a story you had no idea you wanted to know about,” Grigg said, “but if it catches your eye and you learn something about the vehicle that you hadn’t anticipated, then we’re doing our job.”

A story called “Creating a Car Like No Other,” for example, evokes the results of research by La Jolla-based Nissan Design International that found Maxima owners to be passionate about the sheer, well, “Maxima-ness” of their sedans.

The brochure copy lingers over design details (such as the spear-shaped side marker lights) and even describes how the chief designer got inspired by the way his soda cup punched through his food tray at a ballgame. (Yep, he grabs a napkin and starts sketching the proto-Maxima right then and there.)

This anecdote appears in small type at the top of a page--a marginal area the impatient reader (or someone uninterested in design--or anecdotes) can skip.

“We try to give [the consumer] a little bit of everything,” said Steve Davis, Designory’s senior creative director. Each brochure moves from a discussion of the exterior styling to the interior, then on to engineering, safety elements, materials, the manufacturing process, testing and a final two pages devoted to accessories, colors, packages and specifications.

And tying it all together is the story. “Outdoor people” became the creative team’s preoccupation when Nissan, a Designory client for more than a quarter of a century, conducted studies that determined there was a hole in the SUV market. While sport-utility vehicles evolved into comfortable family cruisers and expensive toys, budget-conscious folks who enjoy outdoor recreation chose to drive vans or even station wagons outfitted with shelves, shag carpeting, hooks and bungee cords. Sports enthusiasts who funnel all their discretionary income into equipment, the studies found, are not interested in spending 30 grand on an SUV.

Nissan responded by developing the Xterra, a rugged creature that features storage space for all the gear an enthusiast needs for adventure in the great outdoors.

“One of the things we discovered when we researched this demographic,” said Steve Horman, Designory’s managing director, “is that they don’t want to be fooled and they’re very aware of being marketed to. You have to be very careful. [The brochure] is a real no-nonsense, nuts-and-bolts presentation.”

So distinctive is the presumed Xterra purchaser--an “adrenaline seeker” clustered mostly in the 20-to-35 age group--that the design firm hired an editor of extreme-sports magazines as a consultant. His job included advising on props for the brochure photographs. (“You don’t want to throw in a kayak that’s not hip,” Grigg observed.)

Designory’s creative team soon realized that the usual kind of brochure wouldn’t be the right approach for the Xterra tribe. But the firm still had to persuade the conservative top brass at Nissan to accept busy designs and high-contrast photographs printed on oblong cards casually looped on a metal ring. Not to mention a corrugated cardboard cover with “XTERRA” roughly “stamped” in brownish red and the slogan “A Toolbox for Your Life.”

The approach seems to be working. The first 500,000 Xterra brochures--roughly the average press run for an entire year--vanished in three months, and 400,000 more were hastily printed for adrenaline seekers who request more information at the Web site (https://www.xterra.com), call the manufacturer’s 800 number, visit a dealership or fill out an auto show BRC (short for “business reply card”).

And more important, from Nissan’s point of view, are first-year sales of the Xterra itself. The SUV--one of the stars of a full-line Nissan ad campaign designed by TBWA/Chiat/Day--has sold 20,929 units this year through March 31 and 68,735 in all since its introduction last May.

Jim Hossack, senior analyst at AutoPacific Group in Tustin, stresses that buyers need to believe that they are in control of the purchase process.

“A brochure gives them enough information to be knowledgeable without having to expose themselves to a potential high-pressure salesperson,” he said.

That may be one more reason that dealers, said Dan Gorrell, vice president of San Diego-based marketing and research company Strategic Visions Inc., are notorious for not keeping large supplies of brochures on hand.

Not only are brochures expensive to buy from the manufacturer (as much as $1 apiece or more), but from the dealer’s perspective, Gorrell said, the people who pick them up are probably not the best sales prospects and “the cars are going to sell anyway.”

Nissan, for its part, says that in recent years--with the growth of the Internet and increased use of manufacturers’ 800 numbers--it has persuaded dealers to stock more brochures, on the theory that consumers have become relentless information junkies and will get it wherever they can.

Of course, when it comes to sheer data, brochures can’t compete with the Net. Buyers can pick whatever tidbits they want from independent sites such as Edmunds.com or wade through a stew of opinions from other motorists as well as official information from the manufacturer. Yet rather than hastening the obsolescence of printed brochures, the Internet appears to have increased their viability and even added a new means of distribution via online requests.

Reading a computer screen is fatiguing and slower than absorbing data from a printed page, and image definition still lags behind what is possible with coated papers and sophisticated photography and printing techniques. There is also something impersonal about the Net, many users find; if you’re spending all that money on a car, you crave the warm fuzzies a brochure can offer.

In Grigg’s view, consumers are in “business mode” when they surf the Net looking for raw data--features, options, pricing, third-party endorsements. Brochures can be read when you are relaxed and compared at your leisure. When you’re down to the wire--trying to decide among, say, a Toyota Camry, a Honda Accord and a Ford Taurus--they can help you make a final choice.

Even Gorrell, who believes the Net to be a serious threat to the future of brochures, concedes that people “need to have something in their hands,” particularly when they are considering luxury models.

Jerry Hirshberg, president of Nissan Design International, goes into rhapsodic overdrive about the advantages of brochures.

“It’s touch, it’s weight, it’s feel, it’s design, it’s what’s between the words,” he said. “Brochures are like calling cards or front doors, not mere yellow pages or banks of information. . . . When you pick up the Xterra brochure, before you open [the cover] you have a sense of the world you’re in.”

But does every buyer really want all this information? Gorrell of Strategic Visions reckons that “a good quarter of the car-buying population don’t want to be bothered by facts, figures or any kind of detail.” They buy the same model over and over, rely on someone else’s opinion or care only about color or the vehicle’s overall look.

Well, OK. But that leaves the other three-quarters of us hankering for a little data, or maybe just some pretty pictures--so long as they’re the ones that push our buttons.

“If someone picks up a brochure we’ve worked on and doesn’t find anything of relevance to them,” said Designory’s Davis, “then it’s probably not a vehicle they’re going to want to buy in the first place.”

Cathy Curtis, a former Times arts writer, wrote about mechanic- sculptors for Highway 1 in January. She can be reached at [email protected].