Topic: Monday Rant: At One with the 2014 Mazda6

[Autos_Editor]

Grant goes on a rant about automotive marketing hyperbole.

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[nlm]

My first thought was it looks like a Buick. Is that a proverbial slap-in-the-face to Mazda's KODO marketing campaign?

[dkaz]

It was a funny read until the end. Canadian 6s will not get the 2.0L Skyactiv engine, at least not initially. It'll get the 2.5L Skyactiv engine, Mazda probably heard the critics, but personally I'd wait for the 2.0L engine, I never cared about zooming off from a start, I love taking corners fast on a mountain road however.

But the 2.0L Skyactiv engine produces the same power as the old 2.3L engine that sat inside the first gen Mazda 6 and Ford Fusion. Why the hate? And the 6 barely weighs over 3,000 lb, lighter than pretty much every midsize sedan out there from what I know. In the US, the Mazda 6 with the 2.0 was slated to AVERAGE 40mpg, when most compacts were rated 40MPG but only on the highway.

[Snowman]

Well said Grant 

[Northernridge]

Too funny. I miss the days of opulent press kits...those were big budget projects. I always counsel designers to keep their geeky design lingo to themselves – no one else gets it, not the press, not the customer, not the boss, no one. Still, designers do need to articulate their own stylistic intensions to guide development therefore they carry on in some kind of pixy-dust language that only they care about.

From a marketing perspective, the litmus test is always the same...if the jargon starts to sound abstract or the BS meter starts to tick, then the customer is lost.