Column July 2009.
When Aston Martin boss Dr. Ulrich Bez first stood up in the dining room of the achingly beautiful and astonishingly haunted Chateau de Mercues on the outskirts of Cahors to make his DBS launch introductory speech, he said, and did, absolutely nothing. No impassioned pleas to quell the claret-fuelled hubbub, no flailing arms in the manner of St. Vitus guiding an errant Jumbo jet to the stand… Sporting the smirk of a gently suspicious uncle about to impart a Werther’s Original on an unsuspecting nephew, he just stood there.
After a couple of minutes of this, one of his colleagues had had enough, and set about his crockery with such vim that I swear the spoon cracked the glaze. It did the trick, but Dr. Bez was not amused, muttering sotto voce through gently smiling jaws about ‘subtle marketing’ and suggesting that this was ‘not the way we do things at Aston Martin.’
Laudable, indeed. But, if that’s the case, I asked him as he sat down ten minutes later, why does a small LED screen within the driver’s instrument binnacle flash the words ‘Power… Beauty… Soul’ at you every time the engine coughs into life? Does the man who has already forked out a minimum of £160,000 for the DBS really need to be reminded of the Aston advertising strap line every time he switches it on? Hardly ‘subtle’ marketing.
The anvil-off-a-cliff abrupt silence that followed my question -akin to the piano falling silent as the gunslinger walks into the saloon bar- did not bode well. Dr. Bez is renowned for his inability to suffer fools gladly… Foie Gras being notoriously expensive, it’s remarkably difficult to cower with any degree of efficiency behind a starter sized portion. But I did my best. To his credit, however, the smile barely slipped and, after some thought, Bez merely replied ‘No one has ever asked me that before.’
This surprises me, because this gently naff addendum to the Aston Martin start-up sequence first saw light of day in the V8 Vantage, and my reaction at the time was exactly the same. In isolation, I could probably live with it. But my concern, again first expressed on meeting the V8, is that it represents what I fear is the tip of a bad taste ‘bling’ iceberg lurking just beneath the surface, every bit as potentially lethal to the brand as the real thing once proved to a certain Belfast-built liner…
You built a big ship. It sank. Get over it…
Cygnet. Lest we forget, the ugly duckling grew into a swan, not in this case.
Bez’ analogy is with tenders to superyachts. But this is wrong. Mention the serenella yard in venice and the fact that the temdnders are jewels in their own right, emerging from hidden compartments within the flanks of superyachts more like the contents of a Faberge egg. This is just the egg itself without the contents.
Besides, if this is a tender, who the hell liuves in a house so big that they need a car to drive them from their gargab eback to the front door?
No the correct analogy is of handbag, this is nothing but fashion accessorising. As such, If bez wants to give one of these away with every Aston, he just might shift a few. If he actually makes people pay for them, and they do, then thewre are many more people out there with more money than sense than I’d ever have bel;ived possible.