GM GETS SET TO HIT THE ROAD

By WILLIAM A. MCWHIRTER/DETROIT

After a calamitous decade of billion-dollar losses and misdirected diversification, General Motors Corp. is attempting to reinvent the wheel. In the 1920s, its chairman and creator, Alfred P. Sloan, decreed, "General Motors will be known for building cars for every purse and purpose." As part of a stunning, perhaps even desperate, act of corporate rebirth, GM is spending a suitably giant-size $6 billion this year to launch a fleet of 16 new vehicles. The goal is to occupy rediscovered market niches, and begin the next decade's equally awesome mission--reclaiming its lost automotive empire.

This year Mr. Sloan would have been pleased. From Chevrolet there is the powerful silhouette of the first new Corvette in 13 years and the return of the once popular Malibu family sedan with both headroom and horsepower to spare. From Oldsmobile there is the Intrigue, a new nameplate for an elegantly tailored four-door sedan that, its chief designer says, "looks like a car dressed in a Chanel suit." From Pontiac, there is a two-tone macho minivan for suburbanites who still lust for the fast lane. From Saturn, the EV1, a noiseless, all-aluminum electric vehicle. From Cadillac, Catera, GM's first Euro-American entry, designed to take on such young luxury imports as the BMW-3s and Lexus ES300.

Having sold or put up for sale such subsidiaries as Electronic Data Systems, Hughes Aerospace and a part of its Delphi parts division, GM is betting its future solely on its ability to sell automobiles at reasonable profit, something it has not done in North America since Cadillacs had fins. Says Rick Wagoner, president of GM's North American operations: "It's a watershed year for us to show that we can do great products. It's the freshman class of a new generation."

To which a generation of GM investors, analysts and observers might say, "Again?" GM has had more turnarounds than a buck private on guard duty, all of them leading nowhere. In the swift and ravaging decline of a single decade, GM's car sales dropped off by nearly 2 million vehicles, or 40% of its 1985 volume, a loss that was only partly cushioned by a 21% rise in truck sales. Management made poor, even inexplicable, choices. For instance, in 1983 the company suspended production of the Chevrolet Malibu, the country's favorite family car and one of its all-time best sellers, totaling more than 6.5 million cars in a 20-year run. A year later, Ford claimed that turf with the Taurus. In the next 10 years, Chevrolet and Pontiac sales slid 37%, Cadillac's 42%, Buick's 49%. Oldsmobile's crashed 71%. The company lost a total of $30 billion from 1990 through 1992, a cash drain that amounted to nearly $50 million for every working day every year for three years, before the GM board finally staged the 1992 coup that installed the present management team under chairman Jack Smith.

GM senior executives now openly admit what was stonewalled at the time, that the giant company's steady roll toward the precipice finally came to a halt only a few feet from the edge. Says vice chairman Harry Pearce, then GM's general counsel: "We came perilously close to declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy. We were almost too far down the hill. The first act was simply to survive."

GM survived until this year by giving away the store--lightly restyling and updating its 12- and 15-year-old workhorses such as Buick Centurys and Chevrolet Corsicas and underpricing the competition. The company also went on a brutal cost-cutting crusade throughout its production system, beating up suppliers for price rebates and consolidating 27 separate purchasing organizations into one worldwide group that "commonized" such once disparate auto components as braking, air-conditioning and radio systems. Under the new purchasing program, for example, instead of buying 123 different steering columns, GM will stock 50. The company can still produce totally different cars. For instance, by using styling feats, suspension adjustments and electronic legerdemain, GM can produce a crouched and hunkered-down Pontiac Grand Prix or a Buick Century, which is a model of civic probity, from the same platforms.

The wave of new vehicles this year reflects the company's efforts to reposition or reclaim many of GM's 49 car and truck brands by updating Sloan's book of marketing. Sloan demanded distinctly different styles for almost every demographic position and taste, a strategy that eventually gave way to identical cars bearing different nameplates. But segmentation is back in vogue, and for GM that means re-emphasizing traditional middle-American, mainstream strengths at Chevrolet while almost totally overhauling the customer base and appeal at Oldsmobile. Image makers at Olds are seeking to shed the stodgy, budget-priced profile that appealed to older buyers (the average age of its Ciera sedan buyers crested at a silvery 68--it was your father's Oldsmobile) into one that is being meticulously groomed and patterned to attract upscale, younger import buyers.

Here's how North American boss Wagoner explains it: "The sun's coming up on Oldsmobile, but we still have a couple of hours to go before first daylight. Chevrolet needs to get its [sales] volume base back. Pontiac is our sports segment, but the challenge is to take that image and convert it into more volume units. Oldsmobile needs to reposition itself to sophisticated, refined midsize-car buyers who will be new purchasers to GM. Buick's great focus will remain on premium American road cars, but it needs to recapture that traditional element from a younger customer base. Cadillac really needs to make its breakthrough as a global player. Saturn's image is just perfect. All they need to do is execute product growth." Whew! Interpretation: GM needs to sell a ton of cars.

The management teams in charge of each of GM's brands are being granted almost unheard-of powers of autonomy and responsibility, making marketing and budget choices that are unprecedented within GM. These zealots insist that only by focusing relentlessly on customer needs (as opposed to production requirements, say) can GM avoid the mistakes of the past.

Witness, for example, the fate of a recent advertising creation, a wacky, Day-Glo pink duck, an escapee from the Cadillac crest, that has been playing a lead cartoon role in ads for the '97 Catera. The "Caddy that zigs" is aimed at younger, entry-level luxury buyers in their 30s and 40s, almost a generation behind most traditional Cadillac owners. The duck may entertain such prospects, but it also infuriated many Cadillac loyalists and even some of GM's top brass. In the past, the duck and the campaign (as well as whoever was in charge) might have ended up as so much corporate pate. But this time Catera's brand manager, Dave Nottoli, 40, held his ground. The duck stays. Says Nottoli: "He's just a little bit different, with a different mission, a different take on life. His dad wanted him to go to law school, but he wanted to become a jazz singer instead. He's a bit of a challenge for all of us, but really he just wants to be a problem solver. He may not be a hit with every 75-year-old DeVille buyer, but that's O.K."

Hey, Dave, whatever happened to gear ratios? This new GM-speak can strike outsiders as numbingly programmatic. At GM's technical and design center in Warren, Michigan, for example, the walls are a marketspeak mural of arrows, block charts, one-word product descriptions and macro boxes of jargon like "needs target," "needs profile," "benefit focus" and "reason for being." Go inside GM's design studios, and its artists work under Brave New World banners exhorting them to remember what their 2000-era cars and trucks are supposed to represent. Flying above one such future vehicle is its own set of May Day credos: BOLD! PURPOSEFUL! ATHLETIC! PERSONAL! SPORT SEDAN PERFORMANCE WITH INTERIOR VERSATILITY TO HAUL THEIR "STUFF" TO COMPLEMENT THEIR ACTIVE LIFE-STYLES. Yet GM's new dots, arrows and product teams have also begun to eliminate the rule of its autocrats, who could famously terrify designers and redesign a car by one simple strut around a new product. Says vice president Phil Guarascio, director of GM's advertising: "We're no longer relying on anyone's golden gut."

Without exception, a corporate cultural revolution of this scale is not won without a vicious fight, and GM is still chock full of gearheads who are torqued off at Smith for abandoning them to folks who wouldn't know which end of a wrench to hold. And GM's bureaucracy, as thick as any company's, can still downshift a project to neutral at the drop of a meeting. One high-level executive says the parade of meetings leaves him only 30 hours a month to work on new products and sales. "Things are 100% better than they were," he complains, "but it's still so tough and painfully slow to get anything done. It's not a problem of overt interference anymore, but it's still an insidious disease where the infrastructure eats up too much of your time. GM is still not fun. The game is so complex, the rules are so voluminous and the scoring system is so tough and incomprehensible that internally, half the time you don't know if you're winning or losing. GM sometimes seems like a very complex watch that has 10 zillion pieces to it, but they still haven't got it tuned so that it tells time."

Chairman Smith, 59, is well aware that the revolution is far from over and that reactionaries are still in place. Says he: "We are different from almost every company because of where we came from. We were formed from a huge number of acquisitions that were run separately by powerful people running separate operations. We're still living with that history. That's why we also need to learn how to run in common, together, with one another."

Smith has chosen a modest position for himself in pushing through such radical changes. His public image has been that of a recluse, so much so that he was initially known around Detroit as the "stealth chairman." His accessories include a gentle, twinkling sense of humor and a soft-spoken, parishioner's sense of manners that is rare in this ego-driven industry. Instead of raw power and corporate perquisites, Smith is all about strategy and execution, and the cohesiveness it can produce even at large companies.

And GM needs a victory soon. Before the introduction of this year's class of products, its U.S. market share slipped again to another postwar low, barely more than 30%; earnings amounted to a meager 1% of sales in North America, far below what senior executives accept as the 5% earning levels needed to survive another recessionary downturn. Only 4 of 30 car brands--all newly restyled Chevrolets--managed to increase sales last year over 1994. Admits Smith: "You stop the new-product programs, and by the time you put them up again, the world has changed. We're just catching up now."

The new models this year are neither the best nor the most beautiful products in a crowded marketplace, even though they represent a vast improvement over their GM predecessors. Maryann Keller, an automotive analyst with Furman Selz, notes critically that "GM should have launched these products a year and a half ago. With so many cars, they still end up appealing to the same shoppers. Camry and Accord really cut across the market and send a very clear and strong message with every dollar they [the Japanese] spend." Although GM is laying out more than $1 billion advertising the '97 models in its heaviest marketing blitz in nearly a decade, the new cars are up against equally new models from Japanese competitors, more aggressively priced with the help of a stronger yen. Rebates and incentives are reaching their highest levels in years.

Despite those obstacles, some of the early returns for GM's new products are encouraging. Olds forecasts a 10% rise in market share--the first in more than a decade--with a dramatic change in its type of customer. For the first time since the early 1980s, the average age of Oldsmobile buyers will dip below 50, with a household income up 50%, to $60,000. Cadillac is also expecting a 10% sales increase, with a lot of help from its zigging duck. Across its car and truck lines, GM expects to regain as much as two percentage points in market share, worth $6 billion in sales.

Nevertheless, GM's $6 billion investment simply pays the price of admission back into the car wars. Now the company has to persuade the customers it has so carefully targeted to change their recent behavior and buy GM. Getting your customers back is the hardest task in retail. Sounding like a true car guy with some of that old-time sales religion, Chevrolet general manager John Middlebrook lays on the challenge: "We have people who swore they were never going to buy another Chevrolet or any GM product. It's time to bring them back into the fold. We need to launch these products, put them out there and let the customer decide. This is put-up or shut-up time." Fighting words, Mr. Middlebrook. But as Alfred Sloan might also urge on his new generation at Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac and Chevy: There is still much to do, and little time left.

--With reporting by Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit

With reporting by Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit