Katayama
gave a small party in March 1964, when total Nissan sales reached five hundred
a month, the target that had been set when the company first opened its
American operation. Gradually there was a little money for advertising. In the
beginning there had been by American standards virtually nothing, simple black-and-white
brochures printed in Tokyo with florid English-language descriptions of the
cars. Katayama hired a Los Angeles advertising man named John Parker because he
was young, did not cost much, and seemed bright. Parker was delighted to take
the Nissan account, unlikely though the future for it seemed, because it? offered a rare entry into the automobile
field. In the beginning it was fairl primitive work, convincing Tokyo, for
example, that its handouts should be printed in America. The budgets were tiny perhaps
$50,000 a year at the start. When Nissan needed to shoot still photos for
advertising, Parker, his wife, and their son and daughter had served as models.
For a long time there was no money for television. The first television
commercial was shot in 1963 for a four-wheel-drive wagon called the Nissan
Patrol. Parker had no television studio in his company and no film equipment. Hiring
a friend who was an L.A. police photographer and who had a 16mm camera, he
drove a Patrol into the canyons and they shot a sixty-second commercial for the
vehicle; to save money Parker himself was again the model, his film debut. The
next year they heard that Roy Rogers, the cowboy actor, liked the Nissan
Patrol, and Parker called him up and asked him to do the company's first full-fledged
commercial. "I can't offer you any money, Roy," Parker said, "but
we'll give you a Patrol, two pickups, and all the glory a man could want."
To his surprise Rogers was delighted to participate.? As the cars began to sell, there began to be
a budget for TV ads.
?
In
the fall of 1964 Datsun made it into the list of the to ten importers for the
first time, a list absolutely dominated by Volkswagen. VW had 63 percent of the
import market with 307,000 cars sold, an average of over 25,000 a month. In
July of 1965 Datsun's sales reached 1000 a month. Back in Japan sales were rising
quickly, which allowed Nissan to keep cutting the price; success was begetting
success. The American market now looked more and more promising, though VW
still appeared awesome. Steadily Nissan and then Toyota gained on the other imports.
In 1966 Nissan was sixth with total sales of 22,000,
?
David
Halberstam "The Reckoning" (1987)
?
