Explain. It’s a pretty widely held opinion about GM and its multiple brands. Buick is hurting bad because their buyers are literally dying and not being replaces. Saturn has a few good cars, but brand perception is low, and they can’t realistically throw enough money at it to make it change, because they’d be taking it away from someone else who needs it, which brings me to pontiac. Pontiac is supposed to be “driving excitement” but they’re all just rebadged chevrolet cars, minus the G8, which is doing poorly based on the fact that apparently advertising has sucked for it, and it has a V8 (which immediately makes people who know shit about fuck cringe like bitches). Pontiac Wave, holy shit excitement. G5 Pursuit, I just wet myself. Every single one of the buyers for these cars would have just bought the equal chevrolet model if the pontiac one wasn’t available. The Outlook/Acadia/Enclave/Traverse thing is dumb. None of these models differ enough to really justify their existence, they could get away with a Chevrolet and Cadillac version.
Notice how the most successful companies at the moment tend to have 2 brands (a common and a luxury band)? Toyota/Lexus, Honda/Acura, Nissan/Infiniti.
Giving consumers too much choice is a bad thing. Then they can’t decide. Consumers are generally stupid. They need to feel like they have a choice, but they can’t have too much or they get confused and then buy something else. I work in Retail (sadly) and see it happen all the time. Like, put a PS3 and Xbox in front of someone, and they usually take a few minutes to decide what one is best. They take 20 minutes to think about it, then say that they’ll have to think about it some more and go home. If I only had the Xbox, they would have bought it right there and then.