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New wave of car branding targets women

Women visiting car showrooms will soon find they are being offered a new wave of cars with names designed specifically to appeal to their tastes. No longer will they be fobbed off with cars that have non-aspirational names such as Fiesta and Panda. From next month they will be offered BabyRiders and EarthMothers — names guaranteed to appeal to today's happening woman.

The scheme is the brainchild of Martin Cleaver from Brand-It! UK, a Hemel Hempstead-based image consultancy.

"It all started with the SUV market," Cleaver told The Rockall Times. "We saw how car companies had taken these monstrous and impractical machines and sold them by using beefy macho names which appealed to men's vanity. If Isuzu had called their car 'The Gannet', for example, nobody would have bought it. But by calling it 'The Trooper', with all the ruggedness and toughness that implies, it was snapped up by a whole swathe of fat middle-aged accountants who felt it would overcome their other — considerable — shortcomings."

The principle is now being extended to the female side of the market, as car manufacturers compete for the elusive "Lipstick Lira". Analysts say we will see more of this behaviour as car companies, their profits squeezed by recent pressure to curtail their rampant profiteering, seek new avenues for income generation.

Cleaver explained: "We took the team of experts who came up with the 'Trooper', 'Explorer', 'Freelander', 'Samurai' and 'Shogun' brands for men and asked them to think of names that would fire women's imaginations in the same way. So far we've sold the names 'EarthMother' and 'SchoolRunner', and we've got high hopes for 'SoccerMom' too, although that one's probably only for the American market. The way these guys understand women's psyches is amazing. I'm particularly excited about the idea of the Ford Womb, Citröen Chlamydia and Land Rover DoubleParker, for example."

Some industry insiders have questioned whether women will fall for such cynical tactics in the way men have. But Robert Kestrel of Car'n'Car magazine told us: "Women are just as bad as men for being sucked into marketing ploys. Look at mascara. No man in the history of the world has ever noticed a woman's eyelashes, yet women spend billions of pounds a year on a product to give them luxuriant revitalising 24-hour waterproof extending lash hold." When asked about his own wife's eyelashes, Kestrel admitted: "I'm not even sure she has any, to tell you the truth."

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