FROM THE EDITOR

So that’s it, Holden is no more… Hard to believe it, but it’s true, the Detroit, USA, parent company General Motors, announcing the fact to a stunned (local) motoring community by way of press release on Monday February 17.

You have to feel for everyone directly affected by the decision and the brutal (someone I spoke to last week compared it to an amputation, which I thought was as good a way to describe it) way it was made.

Think for instance of all the management and staff members at Holden dealers around the country, who – apparently – found out the same time as the rest of us.

Think too, of the hard-core fans, many of whom wear their allegiance to the brand if not on their sleeve, at least under it, in the form of a tattoo.

That’s commitment if ever I saw it. And I wonder how many execs on the team that made the Holden decision have GM brand (i.e. orange bowtie) tattoos!

Stick-on ones maybe!

The billion-dollar question, of course, is, is this a decision General Motors is going to regret?

I believe it is. Not perhaps in the short term. But marketing is a long game. And Holden is part of life here in Aussie and NZ.

The key difference between Holden and – say – Ford, of course, is that Ford is a truly international brand.

Holden, however, was a purely Australasian one. Sure, the Aussies have tried – halfheartedly – to build on this comparatively tiny base by exporting some models to (let’s see) the UK, the US and some territories in Asia and even the Middle East..

The pragmatist in me, of course, says fair play, the ‘brand’ and all the ‘nationalistic bullshit’ associated with it was… too small, too ‘regional’ and too hidebound for a huge global corporation with a preference for left-hand-drive and a market-driven need to come up with a range of electric cars, vans, trucks etc ‘tout suite’… to justify the investment needed to guarantee its survival.

Yet the motorsport nut in me goes… hang on a minute, you philistines, you don’t just ‘retire’ a brand when it suits you. Brands – particularly those, like Holden, with over 100 years of history in a market – are a rich source of knowledge, anecdote and marketing opportunity.

You only have to look at the blanket, carpet-bombing TV coverage an event like Bathurst gets… then think about the amount of time each year is devoted to the event’s ‘glorious history,’ and its late ‘King’ Peter Brock.

Sure, Peter drove all sorts of cars in ‘the Great Race.’ Yet every year the host broadcaster will put together an emotional roller-coaster of a reel featured ‘the great man’ and the… let’s see, that’s right, the Holden Torana XU1, then the Holden Torana A9X and finally a line-up of Holden Commodores, like the two-time Bathurst 1000-winning 1982 Group C model (which, by the way, sold at auction in 2018 for $AU2.1 million) right through to the VX Commodore he last suited up to contest ‘The Great Race’ in, in 2002.

Money simply cannot buy that sort of coverage and/or brand association and Brock is just one of the many ‘Holden Heroes’ whose names are now inextricably linked to the classic Aussie brand.

For fans across the Tasman there is Mark Skaife and Craig Lowndes. And for those here you only have to think of Greg Murphy… with his Lap of the Gods at Bathurst in 2003, and his five-year reign as the King of the annual New Zealand round of the V8 Supercar series at Pukekohe from 2001 to 2003 and again finally in 2005.

And I’m sure I could come up with several other examples if I put my mind to it.

This is the sort of bonus that makes calculating – or rather quantifying – any sort of return on sponsorship ‘investment’ incredibly hard, yet at the same time incredibly valuable because done right (in this case by Holden all those years ago) it is literally the gift that keeps on giving.

Or at least it was, until Monday Feb 17 at 2.46pm NZ Time when GM decided it knew better…