Word: moran
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Merely a Fad? As Ford's biggest customer, Jim Moran takes a vital interest in the company's plans-but he is a man of independent mind. He thinks that the trend to luxury compacts, combined with a trend to greater power, may eventually cause the compact to grow right up again into a bigger, more comfortable car. He considers present compacts-including his hot-selling Falcon-transient fads that will probably win not much more than their present (30%) share of the market...
...Moran thinks dealers ought to be consulted when automakers are planning new models. "If I have $4,000,000 invested in my company," he says, "then I should be invited to see what I'm going to have to sell." For Detroit, the proliferation of new cars is a form of gambling, by which auto makers hope to hit on a widely accepted "ideal" car that they can produce in huge quantities, enabling them to drop weaker lines. Weaker dealers, too, are on the way out. Car dealers have decreased from 47,000 in 1951 to the present...
...Jackets-or Else. Like every big dealer, Chicago's Jim Moran knows that the best way to build up a solid list of customers is to become a pillar of the community-and a solid pillar he is. "If a dealer isn't interested in his community," says Moran, "then he's a poor businessman. I think that any place I go, I am an ambassador of Courtesy Motors." Moran belongs to many charitable, civic and religious groups, is a prominent Roman Catholic layman. He coaches a Little League team that last season won a district championship...
Once all this hoopla gets the customer in. Moran makes it hard for him to leave without a car. His salesmen are among the most anxious, aggressive and articulate in the Chicago area. They begin in low key, but they breathe harder, talk faster and bargain more shrewdly as the moment of truth approaches. Not even a peddler steps in their door without leaving his name and address, later getting a tenacious and thorough followup...
...Moran forces his salesmen to wear maroon jackets, and some have quit rather than do so (chuckles Moran: ''They'd give anything to get out of those red jackets'') He usually fires any salesman who cannot consistently make $250 a week in commissions, but just being around Moran seems to endow most of them with a profitable touch of blarney...