NYT: Cadillac Thrives as a Figure of Speech

[Buick61]

By BEN ZIMMER
Published: November 5, 2009

The Cadillac division of General Motors has seen better days, with woeful sales figures even compared with those of other brands in the slumping luxury-car market. Yet the name Cadillac is thriving, at least on Capitol Hill. A centerpiece of legislation seeking to rein in health care costs is a tax on “Cadillac plans,” the favored shorthand for high-cost insurance policies. At the very high end are “gold-plated Cadillac plans,” or even “super-gold-plated Cadillac plans,” to use President Obama’s turn of phrase. How has the Cadillac brand survived as a stand-in for luxury, even as the cars themselves have lost much of their cachet?

Cadillacs have been a symbol of prestige ever since the first ones were rolled out in 1902, but the association was solidified in the 1920s by the G.M. chairman Alfred P. Sloan, who aligned each of the company’s car models with a stage of social mobility — and placed Cadillac at the top of the ladder. “G.M. ushered you into auto ownership with a modestly priced Chevy and then encouraged you to aspire to an Olds, a Pontiac, a Buick and — at the pinnacle — a Cadillac,” explains Nancy Friedman, a branding consultant based in Oakland, Calif. “So the notion of upward mobility, aspiration and ‘the best’ were built into the brand almost from the start.”

The Chevrolet-to-Cadillac hierarchy offered a convenient ranking system for other lines of consumer products marketed with gradations of quality and price. When Lucien Wulsin, the head of the Baldwin Piano Company, was interviewed by the magazine Sales Management in 1932, he drew an explicit parallel between his product line and G.M.’s, calling the Baldwin grand piano “the Cadillac of our line, just as our other models can be compared to the Buick, Oldsmobile and the Chevrolet models of General Motors.”

While Cadillac was taking on the broader meaning of “the highest quality (of something),” a similar semantic evolution was happening in England with Rolls-Royce. The Oxford English Dictionary records a 1916 usage from William A. Robson’s book “Aircraft in War and Peace,” which spoke of “the best pleasure aeroplane, the Rolls-Royce of the air.” American airmen pulled the same trick with Cadillac. During the 1925 court martial of Gen. William Mitchell, the chief prosecutor countered Mitchell’s ridicule of antiquated DH planes as “flaming coffins” by lauding them as “Cadillacs of the skies.” The World War II-era Mustang fighter planes that J. G. Ballard admired as “the Cadillacs of air combat” in his autobiographical novel “Empire of the Sun” were no doubt more worthy of the title.

“The Cadillac of such-and-such” became such a popular form of praise in the late ’40s and ’50s that even advertisers of relatively small-ticket items borrowed the brand name to bask in its reflected glory. Hillquist sold “the Cadillac of all trim saws,” a Huffy children’s bicycle was “the Cadillac of the sand-pile set,” Rock-Ola was “the Cadillac of phonographs” and so on. G.M. didn’t object to this appropriation, since it only further boosted the status of the Cadillac brand. After all, according to a 1959 advertisement, Cadillac was “the world’s best synonym for quality.” (To get technical, it’s really a metonym for quality, but that wouldn’t fly in ad copy.)

As the years passed, however, the luster began to fade. It was perhaps a bad sign when, in a print ad in 1979, Cadillac felt the need to remind consumers that it was still “the Cadillac of cars.” As the fortunes of Cadillac declined in the ’80s and ’90s, the old laudatory expression became a source of pop-cultural satire: Krusty the Clown on “The Simpsons” endorsed an S.U.V. called the Canyonero as “the Cadillac of automobiles”; the rental-car attendant in the film “Get Shorty” assured John Travolta’s character that the Oldsmobile Silhouette was “the Cadillac of minivans.” Most recently, in the HBO series “The Wire,” when the young female thug Snoop is sold what a salesman calls the Cadillac of nail guns, she dismisses his pitch with the line, “He mean Lexus, but he ain’t know it.”

In the health-insurance field, meanwhile, Cadillac had taken hold as an adjective to describe costly coverage that may require little in the way of co-payments or deductibles. As early as May 1964, a Congressional subcommittee heard testimony from a member of the Florida State Council for Senior Citizens that “Cadillac policies” were “driving insurance rates up.”

“The Cadillac of X” has also survived as a sturdy phrasal template, even if it’s now often used with tongue in cheek. Why has Cadillac persisted and not, say, Lincoln? Friedman, the branding consultant, says she suspects that Cadillac has benefited from “the euphony of its name”: “It rolls off the tongue, which you can’t say about Studebaker or Edsel — or Mitsubishi, Lexus or Saturn.”

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[mgescuro]

Kind of a shame, Cadillac itself can't be the "Cadillac of Cars."

[balthazar]

Inconsistant piece; same phrasing is used when/ where 'warranted', but later the same phrasing is unwarranted/ detrimental in usage.
Agreed tho; the spoken name is quite melodical.

[OLDSCHOOLGMFAN]

Some folks plum talk too much.

[tbirderic]

The fact that everyone knows what the expression "the Cadillac of ----" means is testament to the hold that the Cadillac image once held over all of America.

People will still be using this expression 100 years from now - even if Cadillac is no longer in existence.

[jlmartin99]

Yes, Cadillac today is not what my dad thought of Cadillac when he was buying luxury cars. For me however, I have a view of Cadillac that is clearly different than that of my dad and this writer's opinion. I would suspect that it is because I have actually purchased and compared late model Cadillac luxury cars to the worlds very best luxury brand models and concluded, today Cadillac is very special and one of the best luxury car builders in the world today.

It will be up to the new GM and Cadillac to convey and continue to create compelling luxury car designes and what I have become accustom to from Cadillac.

JLM

[Mustapha Mond]

It isn't only the name. I recall an electric tin opener in the 1970's on the counter in my mother's kitchen that had a logo on the front suspiciously similar to the crest and "V" logo that Cadillac used for so many years. It was so similar to what was on the front of my Granddad's Fleetwood that I wondered how they got away with it.

My Grandfather was a successful man and one of the ways he wore his success was in the car he drove. That was back when such prestige brands as Mercedes were comparatively rare in North America. Cadillac, and to a lesser extent Lincoln, were the rides of the average well-to-do family. I asked my mother when I was little why we had a Buick Estate and not a Cadillac and her reply was that they weren't going to own one until she had a fur coat to wear in it. Once upon a time people believed that to drive a Cadillac without having other supporting accouterments of wealth was almost tacky.

I'm not convinced that Cadillac quality sank as much as other brands rose in popularity. Think how many BMW's you saw on the road prior to the mid-70's compared to now. Cadillac as a brand will never be what it once was because the market is so crowded with luxury marques. But the name will always be synonymous with the upper deck experience. Long may that continue, and may Cadillac one day regain her rightful place in the sociological fabric of America.
-Elliott

[ClassyEldo]

When I was six years old, in 1969, my Dad bought his first Cadillac, a DeVille Convertible. He told me how when he was twelve, his Dad had answered a newspaper ad and bought a used Victorola (phonograph)--going to a big house in a high-end section of the city to get it. The servant at the house asked them how they would carry it home. When they said, "On the streetcar," the chauffeur was called, and told to ride them across the city, in the homeowner's Cadillac Touring Car. The ride left such an impression, that on that occasion, my Dad "made up [his] mind, that he was going to own a Cadillac."

Later, when I was around ten, my Dad told me, while we were waiting in a line of a group of people at a private club, for the Valet Parking attendant, "'CADILLAC' . . . the name is MAGIC. Watch, when I ask for our car, everyone will look to see who owns the Cadillac--and again when it pulls up. That doesn't happen with any of the other cars. It never fails."

To this day, I find it is still true, and it has been my experience that the Valet Parking attendants often "remember" my Cadillac car, and they will get it first--before more expensive Mercedes or BMWs or Lexi--so I still believe this is something special, associated with the Cadillac brand. Let's hope that soon, they'll be back to the level of "Standard of the World!"

[OLDSCHOOLGMFAN]

Classy, that's good to hear! Also, your dad's first Caddy is truly one of the great ones!

[CadiEldo67]

GM is trying to bring that back - subtlety in the new SRX commercials. It's the Cadillac of crossovers.

[mbukukanyau]

Originally Posted by CadiEldo67

GM is trying to bring that back - subtlety in the new SRX commercials. It's the Cadillac of crossovers.

The SRX is the Cadillac of Crossovers.
Its well equiphed and hits a spot right between X5 and SRX. Drives like a dream, styled like nothing else.

[AMERICA 123]

And as time rolls on and new product rolls out - this absolutely priceless reality will be of great value.

[Buick61]

Originally Posted by mbukukanyau

The SRX is the Cadillac of Crossovers.
Its well equiphed and hits a spot right between X5 and SRX. Drives like a dream, styled like nothing else.

No, it's not. It's an overweight, underpowered, awkwardly proportioned, FWD, Mexican-built CUV that would be perfectly fine as a Lincoln or a Lexus, but I know Cadillacs, and this is not a Cadillac.

I've driven it, so I'm not just going by specs and photos.

[OLDSCHOOLGMFAN]

I personally don't think Caddy needed no crossover thing.

[Phoenix]

Originally Posted by OLDSCHOOLGMFAN

I personally don't think Caddy needed no crossover thing.

Are you serious?