Competitive Intelligence

Jeep vs. Hummer

Hummer and Jeep are going at it - with Jeep running an rather risky ad designed to fight back against Hummer's popularity even as the two brands start a somewhat unlikely battle for marketshare - the Hummer based on the latest military vehicle technology, while Jeep's is based on its World War II predecessor. Here's an excerpt from the IHT, detailing the fight between DaimlerChrysler's Jeep and General Motors' Hummer:

Jeep, a division of DaimlerChrysler, recently began running a commercial that showed a bunch of children tooting around in toy Jeeps while a fat child struggled to get his go-cart Hummer out of the mud.

"If it's not trail-rated, it's not a Jeep 4x4," a little girl says to the fat child in a cutesy, I-told-you-so tone. The ad, by GlobalHue of Southfield, Michigan, part of Interpublic Group, is a takeoff on a recent Hummer commercial that depicted a naughty child building a soapbox Hummer and then going off road to win a race. The lavish Hummer spot, by Modernista of Boston, was directed by Scott Hicks, who also directed the movie "Shine," and set to the tune of "Happy Jack" by The Who.

Why would Jeep take a swipe at Hummer?

Ever since General Motors began selling a suburbanized, if still steroidal, version of the Hummer in 2002 called the H2, analysts have pondered the effect of a brand based on a new military vehicle on the brand based on an old military vehicle.

DaimlerChrysler went on the offensive against the H2 by suing GM, asserting that the H2's grille too closely resembled a Jeep's grille.

Jeep lost the case, but Hummer still seemed to be on the mind of GM's rivals at the North American International Auto Show this month. Both DaimlerChrysler and Ford showed rugged sport utility vehicle prototypes that seemed to buck the trend toward tamer, carlike sport utilities. Ford displayed a modern version of its defunct Bronco, while Jeep unveiled a new show car, a massive block of a vehicle called the Rescue, with tire diameters of 37 inches, or 94 centimeters, and a chassis width of 80 inches.

Whether either vehicle will actually be produced is not clear, but many at the show said the Rescue's boxy design looked an awful lot like the H2.

Dieter Zetsche, the chief executive of Chrysler Group, dismissed the idea in an interview at the show. "If anything, Hummer tried to penetrate in Jeep's area," Zetsche said. "This is an absolute, original Jeep, the design of the vehicle, everything. Yes, it has the size of a Hummer, that's true. But I don't know whether there are plans to have certain size brackets restricted to certain brands. That would be new to me."

Hummer and Jeep are not easily compared when one looks at the numbers. Jeep, whose sales declined 4 percent last year, according to Autodata, is a far older brand that sold more than 440,000 vehicles last year. About 35,000 Hummers were sold in 2003.

Hummer is also a luxury brand, with the H2 starting around $50,000 and the H1, which closely resembles the Humvee military transport, at around $100,000. That is why the parking lot at the Hummer Driving Academy in South Bend, Indiana, where rich suburbanites come to learn how to drive off-road vehicles, is filled with Jeep Wranglers - the camp's instructors cannot afford Hummers.

Hummer is planning smaller, lower-priced models to fill out its lineup, which will present a broader challenge to Jeep down the road. But that could take years. Jeep plans to redesign its flagship SUV, the Grand Cherokee, this year, and it will offer a bigger version of the Wrangler.

For now, the Hummer's principal threat, many analysts say, is capturing the mystique that Jeep once had.

"Hummer has stolen Jeep's thunder in terms of image," said Peter DeLorenzo, a former Detroit advertising executive who now edits autoextremist.com, a Web site that critiques the industry.

DeLorenzo, who does some consulting work for Chrysler, added: "Jeep is no longer considered the top of the mountain in terms of off-road vehicles. The H2's image has blown past Jeep overnight."

DeLorenzo said the Hummer advertisement "might be considered one of the best car ads of its type of all time" and called the new Jeep ad "a very childish, amateurish spot that pretends to make fun of Hummer when all it does is make them look terrible."

Speaking generally, Clive Chajet, founder of Chajet Consultancy, a corporate identity specialist, said: "I think it's always risky to be negative about a competitor. It is a form of flattery by the knocker to the knockee, because you don't talk about the competition, and you don't bring attention to them."

Strong identities are increasingly important as the market is overrun with sport utilities. Jeep appears to be choosing to play the stud card, with its latest commercial being one in a series touting the brand's "trail-rated" off-road capabilities.

The Hummer driver? In the Jeep commercial, the fat child, labeled an "imitator," is left pounding futilely on his roof with his black gloves.

So, as Hummer continues to appropriate Jeep's 4X4 image in the minds of auto-buyers, whether Jeep can effectively slam its un-named-but-heavily-hinted-at competitor in its ads might determine whether being "trail-rated" can come to mean anything in the American psyche.

- Arik