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| A VW Pheaton rolling out of its "Transparent Factory" |
Say you were a big company’s Chief Marketing Officer.
Say you were searching for a brand name for your new super-premium flagship product.
Would you choose a name associated with good karma, with success, with victory? Or would you name your product after one of history’s most notorious losers?
You’d choose a name associated with success, right? Or maybe not.
Back in 2002, Volkswagen chose to name their flagship luxury car the Phaeton.
The Phaeton was the most premium car in VW’s history, a luxury sedan positioned alongside the Mercedes S class range, priced at over USD 100,000 in today's money.
The German engineering worked. By most contemporary accounts the car was superb, with a Lamborghini class engine, with refined road-handling, fully loaded with features like passenger-specific climate control. It was made in VW’s famous Transparent Factory in Dresden, where customers could visit the shop-floor and watch their cars being assembled.
Yet, despite the superb product, the Phaeton was a commercial disaster. Production had to be stopped in 2014.
VW Phaeton’s story follows the same narrative arc as that of the mythological Phaeton, the demi-god the car was named after.
The original Phaeton was born to Apollo and a water-nymph Clymene.
In those days, the sun rode around the heavens in Apollo’s chariot, drawn by four white horses, guided by the charioteer Helios.
Phaeton had not trained as a charioteer. But the teenager ignored his own unreadiness, took advantage of an unwise divine promise and took control of his father’s sun-chariot. Unable to control the sun-chariot’s incredible power he steered it too close to the earth (therefore scorching the Sahara), he then overcompensated and steered too far away from the earth (therefore freezing the tundra). At this point he panicked and was plunging the sun towards Greece itself. Zeus had no choice but to throw a thunderbolt at his grandson to strike Phaeton dead. Zeus had his duties. He had to save the planet.
So, why did Volkswagen’s Phaeton fail?
Like all big events this failure doesn’t have a single cause. But let’s not rule out the possibility that Volkswagen invited Zeus’ wrath by invoking Phaeton’s name.
Maybe the Chief Marketing Officer would have been better off choosing a classical sounding name that Zeus didn’t have strong feelings about, like Lexus or Acura.
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| Phaeton the unready charioteer plunging toward the earth |
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P.S. This blogpost was triggered by reading the chapter about Phaeton in Mythos, Stephen Fry's excellent retelling of the Greek epics.
