[aravenel]

I'm fairly sure the reason 21-30 year olds aren't buying houses and cars in droves isn't because they are "quirky eco-conscious individuals" that your marketing "isn't speaking to"... I'm pretty sure its mostly because:

1: Many of them don't have jobs (or have low-paying jobs) because of the economy.

2: Many of them watched their parents drown in debt from houses and cars they bought but couldn't really afford

3: Student debt.

No amount of marketing is going to fix that.

This quote alone just makes me shake my head: “I don’t believe that young buyers don’t care about owning a car,” says John McFarland, GM’s 31-year-old manager of global strategic marketing. “We just think nobody truly understands them yet.”

[rsheridan6]

#3 is underappreciated. We have a generation that's going to be slaving away for years to pay off large student loan debts that are at high interest rates compared to a mortgage. Naturally they're going to be averse to wasting money on an overpriced car when they could be paying a student loan instead, which has a guaranteed rate of return of 5-10% (depending on the terms of the loan), tax-free.

[aravenel]

Definitely that, but also the skyrocketing costs of a college education. The days of paying your way through school by working summers and weekends are over. Either you are lucky enough to have parents pay for your school, or you are coming out of school with debt the size of some people's mortgages. There goes your ability to buy a house or car...

Then factor in that for many folks, they spent that money on that education and graduated to find out the only place that would/could hire them was the local coffee shop for 20 hours a week, and there is no amount of marketing in the world that is going to convince that person to buy a $30,000 car.

[ahoyhere]

You are right. As a dropout, I only learned recently how many of my friends were struggling under monthly student loan debt of $50-80k with payments of $500-800. There goes car money, poof, or 20-45% of a mortgage payment for a reasonably nice home in an urban area like Philadelphia.