Auto Brands Optimistic About 2010 After A Tumultuous Ride

US auto brands are upbeat this week after relatively encouraging December sales, which capped off a tumultuous year in the industry.

In 2009, the car industry continued to be rocked by a recession that exposed poor leadership, inefficient infrastructure, unimaginative design, and outright negligent branding efforts that revealed just how tone deaf many major auto brands were to the hearts and minds of consumers.

Too much chaos to follow? Well here is a fuel-injected account of the most notable auto branding developments of 2009:

(1) General Motors and Chrysler cratered, plunging into bankruptcy and emerging basically emaciated as wards of the federal government and their own unions. One result was that GM pared back to four core brands and Chrysler's customer traffic dried up.

(2) Arguably, Toyota vaulted for the first time to the top of the US industry as the company's retail sales finally outstripped those of its largest domestic rivals for the year. Only the fact that Toyota's fleet business is a fraction of GM's kept Toyota from the top spot overall, which GM continued to occupy.

(3) Ford became re-ascendant thanks to timely payoffs from the overhaul of its product line, capacity retrenchment, and prescient moves in the private financial markets a couple of years ago -- as well as its decision to forego federal assistance during the depths of the sales depression last spring. It even began breathing down Toyota's neck for the No. 2 spot.

(4) There was more jockeying than in recent memory for spots among the rest of the industry's Big Six. For the first time, Honda easily outstripped a wounded Chrysler for the fourth position, for the year selling about 14 percent more vehicles than the third member of the old Detroit Big Three. And the surging Hyundai-Kia franchise fell only about 35,000 units short of overtaking struggling Nissan for the sixth spot.

(5) Audi outshone the other German luxury makers, at least on a relative basis, with its overall 2009 market-share gain expected to comprise the largest of any imported luxury-car brand.

(6) Ford executives were actually beaming more about advances in “brand metrics” than in sales per se.

“Favorable opinions such as shopping Ford products and intentions to buy are at record levels,” said Ken Czubay, Ford's vice president of US marketing sales and service. Ford's surveys show that consumer intentions to buy a Ford product have risen more than 30 percent. “In some ways the improvement in brand health is the most gratifying result of the year,” Czubay said.