Filler Brands

Podcast Episode: 0231
Exploring the Rise and Fall of Filler Brands

     ​Unlock the secrets of the automotive industry's hidden gems with us as we explore the world of filler brands. Discover the intriguing role these brands have played in bridging gaps that main companies overlooked, much like holiday snacks filling in the gaps between meals. 

​We'll journey through the history of brands like Plymouth, Viking, and Mercury, which were crafted to cater to niche markets and varying consumer needs. We'll also examine the current market, highlighting sub-brands like GMC's Denali and their continued significance, especially in expanding markets such as China.

Listen in below:

​         Well, it's that time of year again where we start eating a little bit more. It's not just because it's the holidays, it's because we all get together, but really, when we go out, do we really need to have all those extras, all those little bits of chocolates and candies and chips and cookies and crackers and nuts? These are all filler products and they're all the things that are used to keep us from getting too hungry as we wait for the main course. Well, in the automotive industry, fillers do exist, and they exist as dedicated companies only serving one general purpose. In the automotive world, these companies may not be here forever, but for a short time. They're used to fill a small gap which the main company doesn't want to go after at that point in time. Today, AutoLooks is going to be taking a look at filler brands and why they're here, have been here or are gone.
 
        Now, welcome back to the AutoLooks podcast. I am your host, as always, the doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay, coming to you from our host website at AutoLooks.net. If you haven't been there, stop by, check it out, read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings and go to the corporate links website page. Big or small. We have them all on the AutoLooks.net website. The auto look podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group, distributed by PodBean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net. 

          So, like I said in the beginning, filler brands. They've been here since the dawn of the automobile and they've all been used to drum up more sales from even tiny little niches in the marketplace. We're not talking about those niche products that some car companies bring out just to fill a space for a short amount of time. Hell, remember when Dodge had the Dodge Stealth in the 90s and they're just trying to fill a space because of the loss of the old Dodge Daytona from the 1980s and the fact that people still wanted sports cars from their brand. Hell, even the release of the Dodge Dart in the teen years was more of a filler product, wasn't really required, wasn't really needed, but it was there. But these were products. We're talking about whole brands. Why are some of these brands created and why do they even exist? There actually has been a lot of big brands that have been fillers over the years and the funny thing is some still exist and others we wonder how they ever existed in our automotive world. Now, today we're taking a look at some of these amazing filler brands. And, hell, if you look back to the dawn of the automobile industry and we talked about in our divisions of the big three, there have been a lot of these little filler brands.
 
          But back in those days you needed these filler brands to fill in the gaps between car companies, because specific brands can only go to specific price points and after that you needed something else to fill the gap between that and the next tier of the automotive marketplace. Like the whole reason why Plymouth was actually created for the Chrysler Corporation was to fill a gap between where Dodge and DeSoto ended and where Chrysler began. Plymouth was thrown in there as a filler, similar to that of the Viking brand between Oldsmobile and even Marquis brand from General Motors. Hell, even the Mercury brand was created for this essential purpose. It was thrown in there to fill a gap between Ford products and Lincoln products, because there were people who were just outside of the luxury stable looking in but couldn't afford those and they wanted to look like they had more money and more ability to gain better products than the people in the standardized products of a Ford, they wanted their in-between car, they wanted that Mercury.
 
         So, back in those days a lot of these car companies were essentially just thrown out there by big makes to fill tiny little gaps in the marketplace. Now, every car company couldn't do this because a lot of them didn't have enough products to even suit a main line. But some of the bigger ones that were trying to hit every price point in the marketplace would do this. In today's market we don't look at that, because a Ford can go from being $5,000 all the way up to over $100,000 for some of their products. We look at a Ford F-350 Platinum pickup truck and we say, oh yeah, we'll pay $150,000 for that truck Coming from the same company that we're looking at something like a Ford Fiesta at the bottom end for about $10,000. We're like, yeah, that's the same brand, that's a platinum edition.
 
          See, today we have additions that add as our fillers. A generalized company can have filler nameplates attached to them. General Motors has done this with the GMC brand for years with the Denali namesake. Denali essentially is the Cadillac of GMC products. GMC is already riding higher above the Chevrolet, echelon, gm or GMC rides in the premium marketplace where you enter the market on a Chevrolet and you end out at a Chevrolet High Country General Motors. You start just before the High Country takes over but you end on a Denali which is a Cadillac and with the loss of the Cadillac EXT, there is no Cadillac. So, you have to go with the Denali to get a luxury pickup truck and, as we talked about in previous podcasts, we all know that luxury pickup trucks just don't work. Go back and listen to our podcast about luxury trucks and understand the reasoning why luxury car companies don't build trucks and have trouble maintaining them. But these filler brands, like I say, today we have tons and tons of sub-brands, but the filler brands. If you take a look at the Chinese marketplace for the past 20 years has been blowing up with tons and tons of these filler brands. 

       Just taking a look at one company here, I'm going to pull up my list A Dongfeng Motor Group. Okay, Dongfeng is an entry-level product. They build cars, they build vans, they build trucks and they get into transports. They're everything for your entry-level into the marketplace. But then you can move into Dongfeng Forthing, Dongfeng Fengxing, Dongfeng M-Hero. They now have Nammi for entry-level EV products. Then you go to Alias and then you get Voyah at the top Hell. You even have the Dongfeng Yi or Yi to Pi or whatever the hell they're calling it now. They all fit in that. But when you go to Dongfeng’s global website, every single one of these products is Dongfeng with a sub-brand name attached to it. They're filling in all the gaps and all the different price points of the Chinese marketplace. Dongfeng’s saying we can provide something to you in every part of the marketplace, because the Chinese automotive marketplace right now is where the American and European marketplaces were in the early part of the 1900s. 

       Now, the last time we saw massive expansion of tons and tons of filler brands in either North America or the European marketplace was during the 80s and 90s. Even though the market was collapsing, there was still a massive amount of growth in the automotive marketplace. So, filler brands were coming in. Like I said at the beginning, we saw companies like Marquette, Viking, Oakland Edsel, mercury, hell. They even moved Plymouth into its own separate entity, the Valiant brand Hell. 

     Chrysler moved out and created the Imperial brand. They were all made for a short amount of time to fill these small gaps. Chrysler never needed to make a high-end product. Chrysler was able to reach that but to get the clientele away from products like Rolls-Royce and Bentley, they decided to release the Imperial nameplate as a standalone brand. Now, it only went for a short amount of time, between the 50s and 60s and hell. There were a few products in the 70s and 80s, but it never hit that top tier only for a short amount of time. 

     Lincoln did this with their Continental brand as well. They did that because the marketplace, for that short amount of time, was looking at top-tier products, kind of like Cadillac and LaSalle. Lasalle was there at the beginning, but eventually Cadillac took over for the high-end marketplace. Today we look at products like the Celeste Sedan and Cadillac is giving us something that LaSalle should have its name attached to. But in today's marketplace we don't need that. Back then we did need that, but the Chinese marketplace is doing that yet again for us. They're giving us all of these small little filler nameplates. 

     They're trying to hit every portion of the marketplace. See when the automotive market expands exponentially, everybody gets in and everybody tries to fill every single slot. And they try and do it not with more and more products off of the generalized brands, they do it with more and more new brands. They try and separate people from their money, people that look at something like a General Motors product and say I'm not buying a GM, but they release a brand-new company like Gio and Asuna in the 1980s and early 90s. They do this because Suzuki and Isuzu want to sell their vehicles to North American marketplace, but they also want to make money off the General Motors nameplates. They don't want to give all the money to Suzuki. General Motors wants some of it. So, they create these filler brands to go after this brand-new marketplace of young, affluent buyers when the 1980s collapse global collapse of the marketplace happened and people were losing their shirts and tons of jobs were being lost. By the end of the 1980s that market was coming back. After every Great Depression there's a resurgence. 

         Do you remember the Roaring Twenties? The Roaring Twenties was the first time we saw tons of filler brands appearing. The late 1800s, early 1900s and even the teen years of the 1900s were all the expanse of the automotive marketplace, entering into new marketplaces, entering into new product variations and the development of the automobile industry. When Henry Ford blew up the world by the 1920s, we were on wheels and everybody within every buying power wanted vehicles. But not everybody wanted to drive the same thing, and automobile companies knew this. William C Durant was one of the first people to actually understand this in the marketplace and he understood. Not everybody wanted to drive a Chevrolet.
 
         There are people out there that, no matter how much convincing, you couldn't get them to sit behind the wheel of a Chevrolet. It didn't even matter if you paid them to get behind the wheel. They would not do it. These are people who would look at products like Viking, marquis, Oakland Buick, Oldsmobile, LaSalle or even Cadillac All of these extra brands that General Motors owned. They don't want to buy a Chevrolet because Chevrolet is entry level.
 
         You know, I've been working at my job for five years. I make a good living. I have kids. I owned a Chevrolet when I left the farm in my teen years. It was the first thing I bought. I want something a little bit better and they would move in and buy a Buick. It has a little bit better fit and finish, even though it's riding on the same platform and utilizing similar products and similar engines as the Chevrolet products. It was a Buick, it was higher class and then, when they started making more money, they moved up towards the LaSalle’s and the Cadillacs. They were above everyone else.
 
          You saw this in many different markets helped Morris and Wolseley. Even the British industry had different variations. People didn't want to buy the entry-level products when they were making mid-tier wages. So, we needed to find a way to still separate them from their money and keep them within the confines of our dealership doors. But then as we started doing that, we started breaking apart our dealer networks and with that not every dealer would have a full lineup of vehicles. So, by the 1950s Ford was being sold in one dealership and Mercury and Lincoln were in different dealerships. But Ford didn't have a mid-tier product for their dealerships and Mercury didn't have an entry level product for their dealerships.

​        So, Mercury was losing out on money and Ford was losing out on money. Then in select marketplaces you saw things like the Meteor brand and the Monarch brand. In my home country, Canada, these things came into play because Ford dealerships sold Fords and Fords only and Mercury dealerships sold Mercury’s and Lincolns. But the Mercury dealerships wanted a piece of the entry-level marketplace. So, what did they do? They took Ford-based products and sold them as meteors. And Ford did the exact same thing at their dealerships. They turned around and sold the Monarch to hit that mid-tier bracket. Sure, they still weren't hitting the luxury field, but they were losing less sales by not having a luxury brand than they were by not having a mid-tier brand. These dealerships knew that they needed these. 

             When I was a kid, there used to be two General Motors dealerships. You'd have GM Pontiac and Buick and then you'd have Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, Cadillacs. So, you'd never find a Cadillac being sold in the same dealership as a Buick. You'd never find an Oldsmobile being sold in the same dealership as a Pontiac. You'd never find a Saturn being sold in the same dealership as any other General Motors product. They all had their own dedicated dealer networks. But you see, where Pontiac was supposed to be one step up from Chevrolet, and Buick was the next level up. On the other side, you can move from your Chevrolet to your old Cadillac. They moved you around within their dealership and they did this to keep you buying within the confines of that corporate entity. General Motors was one of the last companies that did this.
 
          See, as Ford consolidated all of their dealerships by the 1980s and finally brought Mercury and Lincoln into the Ford empire and had dealerships as the Ford, Lincoln, mercury dealerships, Chrysler, taking over American Motors and American Motors' only dealer network, only wanted to sell Jeeps but still needed a full lineup of vehicles, as we talked about in our podcast about Eagle. That's why Eagle came around. It was a filler brand for a time when the Jeep product lineup couldn't be sold in Chrysler dealers and still needed those products to sell. We needed the cars and we needed stuff to sell and that's why we threw some of these filler brands out there. Plymouth back in the 1960s with the Valiant, was a different reason why a filler brand was created. That name became so big and so powerful that the car separated itself out from the actual car company it was formed from. Ford was trying to do this. When they created Edsel, they were trying to create a brand separate from both Ford and Mercury, utilizing similar features as them. They invested a ton of money and a ton of marketing into it, but when the vehicle hit the market, it was odd looking and people found out it was no different than both other brands. So, there was no variation. It was a filler created for a market that didn't exist. We need the market demand out there.
 
         Why do you think Toyota eventually created the Lexus brand? Lexus was essentially built as an original filler brand where Toyota was looking into creating the Avalon for the North American marketplace and finally giving us a premium branded product for North America, where in Japan you can have premium and luxury products from standardized brands. Select brands only build select style vehicles. Toyota can't build luxury cars, but they could build luxury styled vehicles for their marketplace. Mercedes doesn't build entry-level products, as smart Mercedes is Mercedes. But the North American mentality was we want something more luxurious from a different brand. I'm not going to go down to my country club driving a Toyota Century and telling everybody ooh, they're going to look at it and say it's a Toyota, I don't care that, its build quality is great and that vehicle runs in the same line as Rolls Royce. So, Toyota developed the Lexus brand.
 
        It was made to fill something in the marketplace. It eventually became its own brand. It became more than just a filler brand. It became a dedicated brand. It became more than just a filler brand. It became a dedicated brand. And that's how some dedicated brands originally start. They start filling the marketplace. Mercury started out that way. It's filling product placement. It was that. 

          But by its demise the market had been so saturated by a multitude of different price points within the select marketplaces that it was no longer needed. The same thing happened with Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Plymouth as well. There was no longer a need to fill those price points. But the other reason why the filler market finally started dying out and we lost companies like Asuna and Geo and Plymouth and Oldsmobile is because sales finally hit their peak in 2008, The global financial collapse happened and with it our realization that a Chevrolet can both be a standard product and a premium product in the same stable. We started to wonder what makes it different than a Saturn, an Oldsmobile or a Pontiac Nothing. And with global sales finally hitting a peak of 10 million and not expanding past that, due to the collapse, and even after the collapse had ended and people were going back to buying, it wasn't increasing like it once was.
 
        The global sales in the automobile industry past 2008 and all major marketplaces that existed before it, sales have hardly increased. Only in places like China and India have they increased substantially. That's why the Chinese market has so many filler brands in it now. It's because they need to fill all of these different niches and all of these demands that people want. But right now, with the collapse of the Chinese economy and the fact that their market has become almost completely saturated with products and the product needs of the consumers of their marketplace. Brands are starting to consolidate. Geely is slowly getting rid of all of their sub-brands and moving them all into Geely-branded products. Hell, m-gram used to be the luxury arm of Geely, but M-Grand is a sub-brand of Geely now, and that is all it is. It's a luxury variation of the original product. It is nothing more. Where Renault created Vignale to be their luxury stablemate because they didn't have a luxury maker, ford has their Platinum series and when you add Platinum to a Ford product it becomes the premium product, you’re willing to pay more because you know it's got premium features in it, unlike the Lincoln products. So, for that we don't need to fill a gap anymore and with sales not increasing like they once were between the 1950s and the early 2000s, we don't need to fill any of these gaps anymore.
 
        Like I said, the last major financial collapse in the 1980s nearly killed off a whole bunch of different companies. How BMC collapsed, American Motors disappeared and some of the Japanese ones consolidated in. Suzuki, Isuzu, Subaru and even Mazda were all merged in and became part-owned by bigger corporations. The world was consolidating, but when the market started coming back by the late 80s the demand for new product was there again and people wanted more and more products. General Motors saw this when they created both Gio and Asuna. The entry level market was blowing up and people demanded so many vehicles. So, they gave the market what it needed more and more cars and more and more different companies. Ford tried to do this by bringing over their German products with the Merkur, but never really took off.
 
         You see it, even in the early days in China with companies like Rely and Glegale the same products from the same company with a different name. They were thrown out there to pick up that market share away from the competition. Volkswagen needed an entry-level product for the Chinese marketplace and created the Jetta brand. Datsun wanted to enter the Indian marketplace with a new economy product, so they revived the Datsun name. But as the market got more and more saturated there was no need for these Hell in North America. 

       Our last filler brand product we ever saw come and go was Scion. Toyota took a last stance around the time I was getting into the automotive marketplace where there were people within my generation. With the rise of the Fast and Furious movie chain, it created more pent-up demand for the aftermarket tuner industry. It was the last stance to bring the automotive market back to what it was in the late 80s. Essentially, that movie helped rebirth an entry-level demand marketplace. Saturn started to grow slightly and Toyota even though they had tons of products and managed to hit every single marketplace, realized that they needed more dedicated products for this brand-new burgeoning, entry-level aftermarket demanded products. So, they created Scion for the North American marketplace. With the XA, the XB and the TC, scion gave us our small compact, our really neat and odd-looking cube crossover and her sports coupe Things that that entry level needed. But Toyota always knew that a company like Scion wouldn't be around forever. Scion was made to make extra money off a select market, a tiny little blip in the marketplace that needed to be filled. Whereas my generation got into the marketplace, they knew they roughly had 10 years before that filler demand would disappear.
 
           Now, with less and less people getting into the marketplace at a young age, these new filler brands aren't needed Because by the time we get into the automotive industry we're spending more money on our first vehicle and when we buy that first vehicle, we want to go with a company that has everything we need. They may have only the products in the markets that are the biggest ones out there, like Mazda. They may not cater the products in the markets that are the biggest ones out there, like Mazda. They may not cater to every single marketplace, but give us something within our net worth when I could buy a sport variation of a Camry, I could buy a standard variation of a Camry and then I can move up to a Crown and get a premium product from a standard brand. Because why do I need to move up to a premium brand when I could stay within my own stable? The world of filler brands is dying out, because why do I need to move up to a premium brand when I could stay within my own stable? 

           The world of filler brands is dying out. Our need for them is shifting and the last hurrah of the filler brand marketplace was the electric vehicle introduction, with companies like Polestar, Cupra and even BMW giving us I-Division and then Volkswagen with the ID divisions. Those were sub-brands created, but Cupra and Polestar already existed as aftermarket variations and were now created to be a brand-new electric division of a standardized company. They're filling the gap where, in the future, polestar will eventually just become electric Volvo and Cupra may take over for where SEAT once started.
 
         These filler brands may either be consumed or consume of their own, but do we need filler brands in our future? Is it something that we really see and really want? They existed in times where more and more people were getting into the marketplace, and the reason why all of these filler brands were created was to meet the demands of the market, to fit every single little niche in the. To meet the demands of the market, to fit every single little niche in the marketplace, was the only reason for existing. Some of these filler brands have gone on to become main product lineups of most car companies, but some of them have just either been consumed or have gone the way of the dodo. They've literally gone extinct. Just this past year, we saw General Motors fold the BrightDrop division, as Chevrolet took over for what BrightDrop was. BrightDrop was the new electric van division of General Motors, but, as GM realizes, they don't need to fill that gap anymore. Chevrolet can do the legwork for what Bright Drop had created. Nissan can now take over for where Datsun once was, and Dodge can literally take over for what Plymouth ever needed.
 
          We don't need to fill the gaps anymore, because the automotive industry is losing that demand for gaps that we once needed. The gaps in the market really aren't there anymore and they're disappearing. Whereas demand for automobile sales is decreasing globally, the filler brand need is decreasing as well. So, filler brands, they did serve a purpose. They were here for a short time and they did give us some amazing products along the way. Essentially, the automotive industry does need to fill these gaps. Not every car company sees a need to fill those gaps as they try to fill it in with their own product stable, but others will utilize their own products to fill those gaps with different brand names and eventually absorb them into the complete product lineup.
 
        Mercury no longer exists because Ford now has the Platinum Series. Where the Platinum Series tops out, Lincoln takes over. But can we come to a point in time where Lincoln is no longer needed and Ford can cover everything in the marketplace? I would say yes, but unfortunately that answer only comes down to the showboat style that people have. Who the heck is going to drive to the country club in their Ford Edge when they're going to roll up in their Lincoln MKX? Lincoln makes you appear that you're better than someone else, kind of like how Scion made it seem that you weren't driving your grandfather's Toyota. Pontiac was more performance-orientated to the standardized boring Chevrolet, and Plymouth gave you more features than what Dodge had.

        These filler brands served a purpose. Their purpose no longer exists in the automotive world and that's why they don't exist. But during their time they were needed and required by the automotive marketplace, and today these filler brands are remembered for filling a gap that we had and a market demanded of products across an entire stable. The automotive marketplace is constantly changing and until we have a massive resurgence in personalized mobility, the filler car market will no longer be needed. Today, the Chinese marketplace is finally consolidating, with all these filler brands finally being absorbed into their main nameplates.

          Sub-brands will still exist, but dedicated companies to fill those gaps is completely disappearing on a global scale. We don't need to fill these gaps. Our mentality sees some products as just being within their own world and when it comes to it, eventually some car companies that do exist today will eventually disappear. Buick can only last in a premium marketplace for so much longer. Stellantis has so many brands that eventually Opel and Vauxhall will be merged into one, because they don't need to fill a marketplace with two standardized car companies only because one has a heritage towards Germany and one has a heritage towards Great Britain. It is not needed to fill those markets. Really In the future, will we need these filler brands? No, because the automotive marketplace is slowing down. Until it starts speeding up again, we're not going to need to fill any more gaps. For now, we need to absorb these miniature gaps. 

​          So, if you like this podcast, please like, share or comment about it on any of the major social feeds or streaming sites that you have found the AutoLooks podcast on. Click the like button below, click the share button below and comment about this. Which filler brands have you owned vehicles from and which filler brands do you believe still exist today, which won't exist 10 years from now? Give us a comment below. Tell your friends, tell your family, and go out and showcase to them which brands they may have owned that just filled small little gaps, whether it be decades long as a filler or only a few years. These brands were here to fill something. And after that, stop by the website, check out some of our ratings, check out some of the reviews and go to the Corporate Links website page. Big or small, we have them all.
 
           On the AutoLooks.net website, the AutoLooks Podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by PodBean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at AutoLooks.net. The AutoLooks Podcast has been hosted by the one and only Everett Jay and has been put together by the team at Ecomm Entertainment Group. I'd like to give a shout out to all of our friends, all of our family and anyone that has helped us out in growing the AutoLooks podcast over the years. We look forward to many more years of AutoLooks automotive podcast fun. So, from myself, Everett J and the whole AutoLooks team here, strap yourself in for this one fun wild ride that the AutoLooks podcast is going to take you on.
 
Everett J.
#autolooks