It was just announced this week that GM is phasing out its' Pontiac brand.  While I can't say that I've ever been a big fan of Pontiacs, it's still a sad day in the automotive world.  Pontiac has been in the GM family since 1926 and has become the GM performance brand.  I think Pontiac actually just hit a homerun with the G8.  It's a pretty great looking car.  But one niche vehicle can't save a whole brand.

I'll admit, I'm actually more disappointed that they're getting rid of Saturn.  It seemed like they were moving in a good direction with their product offerings and especially with the offering of the VUE hybrid.  We've all gotten used to $2/gallon gas again so we're not pushing quite as hard for fuel-efficient vehicles anymore but GM's hybrid offering is pretty sparce and the Chevy Volt might not be the savior of the NA automotive industry that the media/government/GM is touting it to be.  It's a great leap forward for GM but there's still a long way to go.  In the mean time it's a shame to get rid of some of their more family-friendly hybrid vehicles. 

The problem is that GM just had too many brands.  There's a lot of development that goes into each vehicle line and even with the move to global platforms they end up having to repeat work.  The average customer can't really differentiate between the brands and they don't have the same kind of brand loyalty that my grandparents' generation had.  I've been trying to figure out what marketing lesson we can learn from this.  There are probably quite a few but the one I've landed on is to focus on what you're good at.  GM has a great thing going with Cadillac and there is a lot of brand loyalty to Chevy.  The demise of Pontiac gives us all a chance to re-evaluate what we're really good at and make sure that's our focus.