GM celebrates 85 years of styling

It's June 1927 and Alfred Sloan, Chairman of the growing General Motors company is looking for a way to take sales leadership away from Ford.

To date Sloan has amassed a number of brand names under his GM banner-Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile Buick and Cadillac -- and his objective for GM is to be number one by offering a range of cars "for every price and purpose".

Henry Ford Snr grew up working hard on a farm. He conceived the Model T as a simple machine to eliminate the drudgery of an everyday working life-a car for the people (a folks wagon!).

Henry sees no need to change the Model T. He believes people buy cars for their mechanical substance. His famous quote that "the customer can have it any colour he wants as long as it is black" misreads the desires of the increasingly affluent American consumers in a big way.

Sloan is a new breed of professional manager. He sees the car as a consumer product and now he's decided that style, and annual styling changes-planned obsolesce will be a key competitive weapon in his quest for market leadership. And so he goes looking for someone to head up his new styling area, the Art and Colour department.

He chooses Californian Harley Earl. It is Harley's job to give visual identities to all the brands and to convince the American car buyer that style trumps substance, which he does. Within five years GM overtakes Ford in sales. By the mid 1950s Harley Earl's focus on style has become the substance!

At GM right now they are celebrating 85 years of the establishment of the Art and Colour section. Although America has had 14 presidents in those 85 years, only six men have held the powerful role of style arbiter for the world's largest car company. Two men, Earl and Bill Mitchell, sat in the big chair for a combined 50 years!

Earl and Mitchell took the styling of cars from a backroom craft and made it the engine of a global organisational and economic powerhouse, and a way of life. So much has been shaped by so few. Harley Earl is remembered at GM with this prayer: "Our Father who art in Styling, Harley be thy Name" Amen to that, brother.

David Burrell is the editor of www.retroautos.com.au