Daily Slideshow: Lexus Feeling the Heat From Customers Over Spindle Grille

The Face

Note: We recently published this piece about Lexus' Cylon Centurion-like spindle grille, and a lot of your responses were along the lines of this comment by forum member mmarshall: ". . . I see little point in posting another thread on the spindle-grilles . . . With few exceptions, we either like it or hate it." Well, we aren't the only ones listening to your input—Lexus group vice president and general manager Jeff Bracken spoke with CarBuzz very recently about this exact topic and, with all due respect to those who are already onto the next issue, let's look at what he had to say about it.

It’s Staying

“I’ll be very transparent. It’s our signature grille," Bracken said frankly. But what is he going to say? That they are changing it, so wait til next year to buy a Lexus?  Though with Lexus turning in acceptable sales numbers, we tend to take him at his word. But he's well aware of dissent among the ranks of the Lexus faithful, and has dealt with them personally, "In fact, I’ll take phone calls from some of these owners and will literally spend 45 minutes to an hour on the phone with me just expressing how disappointed they are,” he shared. “It gives me an opportunity to explain why we’re going down this path. I understand your concern. It’s a very purposeful and strategic move on our part. If we lose some of our tradition owners it’s an unsettling for us but won’t preclude us from moving down this path. We hope to gain more (customers) than we lose. We don’t want to lose anybody, but…”

Edge

The "but" he may be getting at is that, let's face it, in today's corporate world people don't hold onto their jobs their jobs by keeping things the same—the same product, the same sales numbers, the same plans. When Audi put LEDs under their headlights it was a gamble that paid off and put their cars on the map right next to those bustle-tailed "Bangle Butt" BMWs. Lexus' Jeff Bracken, who was vice president of sales for Toyota Motor Sales in Torrance, California from 2010-2013, has a job to do, and that's to sell more cars. When he says: “Our (previous) image had been that of a producer of high-quality luxury vehicles for years. But that wasn’t enough to keep us relevant. It was important that we not only produced high-quality luxury vehicles but also that had to be edgy in terms of styling and cutting-edge technology,” it's clear where he thinks more sales are to be had. Back when Lexus was building its brand, it was happy to have the LS400 look like a sensible version of a Mercedes-Benz, but times, and Lexus, have changed and as Lexus may have found out, "relevance" is hard to predict and "edge" is hard to define—you can do all the focus groups you want but until a design hits the market no one really knows what will happen.

Age

Even if you do become the cool kid on the block it can be a mixed blessing, you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time—that's not exactly how the adage attributed to P.T. Barnum goes, but it's close enough. About the age of the brand's buyers, Bracken admitted, “If our average was 60, then we have to bring that down.” In a follow-up article to the CarBuzz piece done by The Drive, they quoted Lexus communications senior manager Nancy Hubbell as saying, "It’s not that Jeff gets calls all the time. It’s that he has received some calls from people. And yes, we do realize that the grille is something that’s usually more appealing to younger customers but our older customers are learning to like it as well." So, some of the people, the ones close to sixty, are learning to love, or at least live with, the grille rather than switch to something that may be edgier, but not as satisfying as a Lexus. When The Drive suggested the carmaker offer two grilles for each model, something that publication noted the 2018 Camry offers, Hubbell replied "Usually we have our internal combustion gas and we have a hybrid and we have an F Sport. So there are visual differences among all three of those but the grille is one area where the F Sport usually takes a more aggressive stance. And it seems to be working for us because our F Sport buyers are usually younger than the buyers for the hybrids or the regular model."

However...

Maybe the solution, if one is needed, is a compromise—not giving each model two grilles, but perhaps selecting some of the youth-skewing offerings for the fashion experiments, and providing classic frontal interpretations for some of the vehicles favored by their more traditional buyers. According to Bracken, "Some of our models have a more expressive signature grille than others," so why not carry that a step further, just not further into the dark side. As Porsche found out when it grafted a misproportioned 911 nose onto their first SUV, a family design feature is no substitute for a family design ethos.

>>Join the conversation about the Great Spindle Debate right here in Club Lexus Forum.

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