"People who like to buy the Hummer like to stand out," he added. "I've had an Escalade, a Mercedes, a Jaguar. This Hummer H2 draws more looks and questions than any other vehicle I've owned."
Trying to broaden the H2's appeal, GM has begun customizing advertisements for different markets, seeking like-minded souls among readers of magazines from Road & Track to Vanity Fair. A recent pullout in The New Yorker included a cartoon depicting frightened cabbies shrinking from an H2 muscling its way down a Manhattan avenue.
H2 is often presented in GM ads as perfect for those who shop at Restoration Hardware but fancy themselves "rugged individualists," as the company's executives put it.
Many ads suggest it as a fortress apart from the peopled world. In one TV spot, shot in Iceland and scored with trance-like techno music, a couple who seem to have stepped out of a Banana Republic catalog peacefully navigate hemorrhaging oceans, slate-colored terrain and khaki beaches. He wears a US$4,000 watch; she gazes beatifically heavenward.
"Need," the ad instructs, "is a very subjective word."
The Hummer and the H2 are descended from the Humvee, the military transport used in the Persian Gulf War and still in use. GM has sold the Hummer for several years, at about US$100,000. Through a national network of dealerships, GM plans to sell 100,000 Hummers within five years. In just three months, 7,500 H2s have been sold, and GM hopes to sell as many as 40,000 next year -- double the number of Porsches Americans bought last year.
Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, founder of the consulting firm Archetype Discoveries, on which the Big Three rely for information about their customers, said Hummer was an SUV unfettered from the blandness that had overtaken the category. He interviewed potential buyers on behalf of GM and found a sentiment among buyers that "the SUV is the new minivan."
With the Hummer, Rapaille said: "People told me, `I can protect my family. If someone bumps into me, they're dead.' People love this feeling." One female H2 buyer told him: "I have three kids in the car with me and no one is going to look at me as a soccer mom."
A male customer in the construction business said he needed the H2's off-road capability for work, but Rapaille called that explanation an alibi.
"He could have had a Jeep or another SUV, but the reality is you want to show strength," he said, adding that after the Sept. 11 attacks "we feel we are at war and people feel the need to be protected."
For its part, GM is facing slim profits, stiff overseas competition and industry sales beginning to slump. The company thinks it may have the beginnings of a brand that people will buy on its own merits and plans to turn Hummer into a post-modern version of Jeep. A pickup H2 is due next year and a smaller, cheaper Hummer SUV is being considered for 2005.
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