Making a small car look big
 | Gerry Rubin |
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We came on when Honda was in its infancy, and we had an opportunity to take a pallet and put all the colors on it. But so did Honda because all Honda had was the Civic sedan. Granted, in 1970 it had the 600-series car. But that was the car that fraternity brothers picked up and put on sorority porches in a drunken stupor.
So up until this point they only had about four years of experience with this little 600. What our research said was this was basically a two-cylinder vehicle. The perception by the customer was a Honda car was small because of the motorcycle heritage.
Our introductory budget in 1974 was about $7 million. We made a decision out of necessity to put the whole budget into print. Not only that, it was in spreads -- two pages facing one another. The reason we did that is because we wanted to overcome the small-size impression. We wanted that car to look big.
