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In Paris, automakers are learning there are limits to pure branding. It turns out showroom visitors actually want to look at (surprise, surprise) cars.
By Jennifer Kabat
Photography by Jimmy Cohrssen for Metropolis
February 2002
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Last year Le Rendez-Vous Toyota, on the Champs-Elysées, featured
environmentally themed seasonal installations such as this summer wheat
field (above).
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The showroom, which features gentle curves (left) and Web-access
computer kiosks (right), is designed to please the company's family
clientele.
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People mill around among fancy furniture mounted like art on plinths. "Ne
touchez pas" placards adorn each stand. Visitors lean in carefully,
arms clutched behind them in that pose universally deployed in museums to
reassure watching guards. No one dares brave a smile as they regard such
ironically named pieces as Tatami--a lounge chair and ottoman made of straw
mats more commonly seen by the seaside. One man pulls his chin and examines
Christophe Pillet's Beach chair, with a garish orange Hawaiian-shirt pattern
splayed across it. All the big stars of contemporary design are on display:
Philippe Starck, Patrick Nourget, Pillet. But this is no museum or gallery.
This is a car showroom, Paris's L'Atelier Renault, and it's only connection
to autos are the two on podiums in the middle of the room.
Here on the Champs-Elysées, sandwiched between theme restaurants
and high fashion, you'll find automobile showrooms where virtually
no cars are sold. Instead they push brand image. Renault touts itself as
a sophisticated brand: contemporary glass-and-steel architecture and a swank
restaurant decked out with design classics. Toyota is family friendly--Disney-style
exhibits and workshops for kids--whereas Mercedes goes in for blond wood,
interactive kiosks, and displays extolling the cars and their vaunted history.
The showrooms are what Toby Procter, a consultant and editor of Automotive-Online,
calls "3-D advertising billboards."
Traditionally car dealerships operate as franchises. They have short-term
goals and operate on tight margins. Although car companies can audit their
franchisees' books, it's difficult for companies to manage the dealers
and what happens in their spaces. To wrench back control over their image,
automakers are opening their own showrooms in busy urban areas. These exist
solely to laud the soft-and-fuzzy feeling of the brand.
"Brand is by far the most important thing in the car industry today,"
says Chris Cedergren, managing director of California-based consumer marketing
consultants Nextrend. "Consumers look at brands in a very different
way now. Brands define an attitude and a lifestyle that the person
buying a brand's products wants to convey."
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Intended to appeal to sophisticated consumers, the Renault showroom
(above) has a cool industrial aesthetic that incorporates designer
furniture such as the Panton chairs (below) in its restaurant.
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And in the name of brand image the auto industry has gone in for the elusive
realm of lifestyle. Lincoln sells Florence Knoll chairs on its Web site
to show people that they're stylish and urbane (not the brand driven by
old men with one foot in the grave). All the major luxury marques produce
accessory collections to extend their influence and logos into the
world of fashion. Mercedes even markets a limited-edition snowboard. The
various marques in Ford's high-end division--Aston Martin, Land Rover, Volvo,
Jaguar, and Lincoln--will soon be selling goods like driving shoes, cuff
links, and sterling-silver cigar cutters. They're all designed by David
Hundley, a former Gucci designer among whose chefs d'oeuvre at the Milan
fashion house was Gucci Dog, a high-grossing, press-generating line of pet
accessories. Lincoln-Mercury has hired a former consultant from Prada Sport,
Holly Brubach, to advise the marque on its image overhaul. "Car companies
have tried to skew their advertising and presentation away from the car
per se and more toward associative elements," Procter says. "All
because functionally cars are so identical within their class that carmakers
need to do this to differentiate them."
These moves are all long in coming, Cedergren says. "Consumers are
more sophisticated, more affluent, and buying everything from sneakers
to cars based on intangible needs like self-image and self-expression. And
that's a good thing for companies--because any product that is driven by
one's emotions, consumers are going to spend more money on and change more
frequently."
Thierry Tuteleers, director of L'Atelier Renault, sits on one of the steel
footbridges that crisscross the upper levels of the massive showroom. He
fights his way forward in a leather armchair so enveloping it could
conceal a tryst and waves his hand around the space grandly. "The advantage
of a better brand image is the opportunity to sell more and raise the price
of your products," he admits with a frankness no American brand manager
would ever allow.
The trend on the Champs-Elysées for salesrooms that don't sell began
with Le Rendez-Vous Toyota. "We started planning it five years
ago," showroom director Eric Le Paire explains. He's sitting on a tasteful
pale lavender sofa in the Lexus Lounge. Wood carved to look like corrugated
cardboard hangs on the wall behind him. The lounge is largely abandoned,
hidden behind the restaurant and worlds away from the bustle of the rest
of the showroom, with its focus on Toyota's family-oriented image. "We
needed something in Europe to boost our brand," he says.
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In addition to Disneyesque exhibitions (above), the Toyota showroom has a
café (below) to encourage visitors to linger.
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Christian Brühe, who designed the Toyota showroom, agrees: "Lexus
is absolutely unknown in France. If we spot one on the street in Paris,
we call Toyota and say, 'Oh I saw the green one,' and they know which car
we're talking about. Not just the model number, but the actual specific
car sold." Toyota brought in his exhibition and trade-show design company,
Uniplan, to develop and program the space. "Toyota is a very normal
brand--unlike, say, Aston Martin or Mercedes--so we had to create a draw
to bring people into the showroom."
When it opened in 1998, Le Rendez-Vous Toyota used lighting effects such
as striking backlit red double-height columns that people could see from
both sides of the Champs-Elysées--to lure people to the company's
prime corner location. Uniplan made the interior of the showroom look rounded,
soft, and approachable with a spiral staircase, a curved reception desk,
and natural wood. There's a hole cut in the ceiling between the first
and second floors to create a sense of openness. It's all designed
to appeal to women and young people, Toyota's target audience.
Renault ran a design competition for its showroom that included Starck and
Jean Nouvel and finally settled on Franck Hammoutene, a Parisian architect
whose projects include the legendary restaurant La Maison Blanche and a
daring church perched over three levels of highway in the north of France.
Still, Hammoutene's and Brühe's designs function almost identically,
extolling brand values while remaining only loosely connected to cars. During
the past few years, the Japanese carmaker's brand-space has run shows on
the environment, world music, and computer animation, whereas Renault's
displayed cutting-edge fashion designers, high-end cinema, and contemporary
design since it opened just over a year ago. Both showrooms have restaurants.
"It is meant to make people stay in the showroom," Brühe
says, "so they don't just wander in, walk through, and leave."
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