Fiat Should Merge Its Brands

So Fiat CEO Segio Marchionne has announced that a merger between brands is the most likely way to go for several of its marquees. Reports from a couple of weeks ago had it thatAlfa, Abarth and Maserati might be merged into one brand. Fans of each of the marquees might be pissed off with the idea but the move makes a lot of sense. Let’s take a look at the brands currently under Fiat right now. They’ve got Fiat, Ferrari, Maserati, Abarth, Alfa Romeo, and Lancia in the European front. And since they acquired Chrysler, they also have Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram. Probably the one brand that absolutely needs help is Alfa. Sure, it’s lauded by people (like the boys of Top Gear) to be the petrolhead’s car but on a business standpoint, the brand has been underperforming for the past years. Its got six models based on three platforms that only manage to

sell 100,000 units. That’s very very poor especially when it takes millions of dollars to develop one model. But the problem lies deeper than that. You see Alfa doesn’t quite exactly have a role in Fiat’s lineup. Fiat’s got the small car covered. Abarth’s got the fast small cars. Ferrari’s got the fast cars. Maserati has the tamer Ferraris. Lancia has the classy cars. That leaves Alfa to strive for the gaps and those gaps are just plain crap cars. With Chrysler brands set to class with the market segments of the European brands, that leaves Fiat with a business problem. It’s not like they have the monopoly of the market to saturate it with competing brands. Even if they do have to monopoly, they’d probably end up like British Leyland. And we all know what happened to that. So yeah. Merge ‘em, Sergio.

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Fiat Should Merge Its Brands