digitalnirvana BHPian



Join Date: Mar 2015 Location: pale blue dot Posts: 304 Thanked: 970 Times

re: Is MG alias SAIC fooling prospective buyers by selling a Chinese car as "British"? Going against a few senior posters (especially Narayan whose posts are almost always bang on the money), I'd say yes to the question.



There are two main points to address when I ask myself this question.



1. Are other manufacturers not doing similar badge engineering? : Examples given in this thread range from Dacia-Renault to Volvo-Geely. Dacia was a brand tottering on the brink of demise when Renault saved it, and though I don't know for sure but I hope Renault contributed towards the product engineering of the new generation of reliable Dacias. Volvo is a stalwart while Geely, well, is best known for copying designs. So no reason why Geely would sell Volvo cars under it's brand.



MG was a dead company and SAIC bought just the logo. It is very different from taking over an existing and alive brand and incorporating it within your umbrella (I give the examples of FCA & VW here, lest someone asks if we call a Porsche a VW)



What differentiates a Renault or a VW or a FCA from SAIC is the former has pedigree and heritage, and the latter doesn't. So we cannot compare their situations and approaches towards of badge engineering.



SAIC is a very young carmaker, which was helped by the government-mandated partnership with GM (including technology transfer) to learn the ropes. There is no other comparable "brand appropriation" (I think this term is more apt than just badge engineering in this situation) that I can think of, when trying to find similar examples to SAIC's use of the MG brand



2. Is it just limited to badge engineering a single product ie the Hector? : MG/SAIC India have built up the brand on the perception of Britishness and history. The point that I am trying to stress is that this is not just about one car (like the Dacia Duster or even the Dacia Logan). No it goes way beyond that and the entire company and its suite of future products is based on the hard sell of its British pedigree. Which is honestly untrue. The brand was dead for years with no link at all between what MG stood for and what SAIC are building now. If it were the case that Baojun 530/Wuling Almaz was a product where MG had some collaboration with SAIC and it were a one off case of badge engineering, I'd be ok with the image of Britishness they are projecting. But the entire portfolio of SAIC India including future cars are going to be marketed as British and that does not sit right with me.



Summary : The closest parallel of what SAIC is doing that I can think of, is with another brand that's very close to us Indians. A few years ago Kraft purchased Cadbury's including the rights to all its brands. The iconic Dairy Milk had its recipe changed and I've seen a fair few complain about the Kraft-Cadbury Dairy Milk - because it's just not the same anymore. The only difference between that case and SAICs is that the British know their homegrown chocolate manufacturer has been bought over (it was a hostile bid too, if memory serves me right) and there's thus a bit of negativity towards the Americanized products.



Us Indians don't know about the MG history at all (at least most of us don't) and we're thus being misadvertised to.



This is not just an ownership change. I'll give another example using football here. Think of Manchester United or Liverpool under American ownership (where the brand has changed hands but the structure of the club is unchanged) versus Manchester City or PSG under Emirati owners (where only the club name is unchanged and everything else is different).



Also to clarify, I'd have said the same thing if SAIC was Indian or German or whatever, and this has nothing to do with them being Chinese. Five years down the line their products will have made or broken their company and not the brand. Perhaps I'll then look back at their initial brand building exercise in a more favorable light. But not now, because right now all they have is a homegrown Chinese product masquerading as a British one Last edited by digitalnirvana : 24th July 2019 at 21:35 .