Fiat Chrysler Faces Sales Backlash for Martin Luther King Jr. Ad

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 3:45AM EST · Published Feb 5, 7:10AM EST

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Fiat Chrysler Faces Sales Backlash for Martin Luther King Jr. Ad — © courtesy of FCA US LLC

For some inexplicable reason, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Inc.’s (NYSE: FCAU) Dodge division decided to sell its Ram pickup by using a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The speech that the Fiat Chrysler ad featured was given 50 years ago.

The car company has to brace itself for a sharp drop in sales of the vehicle, which had just been redesigned.

The manufacturer described the ad in a note to the media:

The heart of the 60-second spot is a speech that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered exactly 50 years ago today, February 4, 1968, that illustrates this value perfectly. The Ram Truck brand believes in Dr. King’s notion that “everybody can be great because everybody can serve,” and Ram owners demonstrate this commitment every day in lending helping hands to their families, friends and communities. The spot is comprised of 26 powerful images of those serving others, with Dr. King’s commanding voice calling for all of us to serve.

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The nearly universal reaction was that FCA tried to use Dr. King as the equivalent of a car salesman.

FCA’s Ram sales have started the year in trouble. In January, the Ram brand sold 29,358, down 13.1% from the same month last year. It is already in third place among full-sized pickup sales in the United States. The industry leader, the Ford F-150, sold 58,937 units, up 1.6% from January of last year

Surging sales of the number two pickup based on sales, the Chevy Silverado, were up 14.5% in January to 40,716.

Ram has introduced a major redesign of all the pickups in the brand. It is counting on this redesign to close in on Chevy’s Silverado for the number two spot in U.S. full-sized pickup sales. The shameful use of the Dr. King speech in a Super Bowl ad will set that plan back, perhaps for a very long time.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.