Is the Barina name too girly?

In 1985 the Holden Barina hit the streets of Australia, powered by a thumping 50kW 1.3-litre engine. It was a vehicle that quickly gained traction with the female demographic and one of Australia's most memorable automotive advertising campaigns, the Beep Beep Barina, entrenched the car as a favourite among the fairer sex.

But the all-new Holden Barina brings with it a more masculine design, one that takes cues from the motorcycle genre with its naked-bike inspired headlights and motorcycle-style digital/analogue instrument cluster.

Holden is keen to attract more young men into the new Barina but as Simon Carr, the Director of Marketing at GM Holden explained, it still expects female buyers to outnumber male.

"The car is more biased towards female buyers because that's where a lot of the buyers are at the moment. But we're hoping with this vehicle to attract more males into the segment for Holden. Our expectation is for 60:40 [female:male] buyers.

"We set out from the beginning to make it have as broad appeal as possible ... so having a broader visual appeal would be a good thing."

Carr revealed to motoring.com.au that discussions concerning the changing of Barina's name took place, particularly after Holden executives saw the more aggressive exterior design.

"We had a debate about whether we should move away from the Barina name ... there was a lot of debate at the beginning about do we start again, because the car is going to have a lot broader appeal. Barina started its life as a girl's car, as you know.

"When you've got 25 years of heritage there - and the Barina has been a number of different things over that time - we thought it was too much of risk to move away from it."

There was even a suggestion to call the Barina Spark plain old Barina, and find a new moniker for this particular vehicle. Similar to when Nissan ditched the Pulsar name for Tiida, which was a spectacular failure.

Carr wouldn't say what the other names were (feel free to comment your thoughts on a more male-oriented name - it's called the Sonic in the US and Aveo in Europe) and moved the conversation along by pointing out that attracting male buyers can be achieved in other ways.

"We could actually achieve a more gender neutral [buyer split] just by positioning our marketing a bit better, and also when you get enough of these cars on the road people will see that Barina has changed. So that was really our thinking.

"The focus of our launch campaign will be very much online, with TV campaigns to follow later, but the target market for this particular vehicle is very involved with the internet, social media and so forth, so this is the most apt place for us to go. And in this environment, you can be both male or female [oriented] very easily with campaigns directed at both.

"You can be female: There's a lot of design features particularly on the interior, that you can focus on with the female part of the target market, while you can do the more sporty masculine marketing via the exterior, with the look of the new Barina," noted Carr.

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