Autos: The indirect Sell

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Detroit's Big Four auto companies spend $385 million a year advertising their cars. They also get a lot of mileage, for much less money, from hidden or indirect promotion efforts designed to keep the cars in full view of potential buyers. The firms compete hotly with each other for almost any promotion—from having their models used on TV shows to supplying cars for celebrities—but the fiercest infighting is to win a favored position with the big rent-a-car agencies. Here, some major changes are occurring. Chrysler has already won the lion's share of the Avis rental business from Ford, and Hertz by year's end will complete a switch that will make Ford rather than Chevrolet the predominant car in its fleet.

The switches are important because automen believe that each rental car is a rolling showroom for their products. "It's one helluva demonstrator," says Fred C. Zimmerman Jr., general marketing manager for Ford's Lincoln-Mercury division. "There is no salesman riding along, and nobody bothers the guy. The car practically sells itself." The auto companies help pay the costs of any rent-a-car ad that plugs their cars by name; one reason Hertz is switching to Ford is that Chevrolet declined to pay more of mutual advertising costs, while Ford offered to pay a generous half. Rental cars are usually bought through local dealers, but Chrysler supplies them on a leasing basis only, trades them for new cars after just six months to make sure customers never wind up renting a battered Plymouth or an un-tuned Dodge.

Gone to Press. Detroit has developed dozens of other ways to get potential customers to test-drive its products. The auto companies encourage local dealers (often with a $400 rebate) to lend new cars to high school driver-training programs, hoping to win the allegiance of teenagers, also push sales to company car fleets. Lincoln-Mercury executives tour the U.S. to talk about autos to such groups as Rotary Clubs and women's garden clubs, sometimes offer their audiences free use of new Mercurys for a week.

To get their cars before the eyes as well as into the hands of potential customers, the automen keep hundreds of new cars in Hollywood, lend them to studios for a year in return for a guarantee that they will be used in movies and TV shows. A new Lincoln was squeezed into a tiny cube by a giant press in the James Bond movie Goldfinger; the villain who arranged the crush-out to get rid of a rival carted off the metal remains in, of all things, a Ford "Ranchero" pickup truck! Chrysler has signed agreements with no less than 17 TV shows to use its cars, among them Peyton Place, Dr. Kildare, the Beverly Hillbillies and The Fugitive. Napoleon Solo escapes Thrush in a Dodge; Efrem Zimbalist Jr. tools around on FBI business in a Mustang.