COLUMN ONE : A Sales Pitch Made in U.S.A. : A ‘Buy American’ campaign for cars is gaining momentum amid worries about Japan. But patriotism may only sell so many. Ultimately, price and quality matter most.

It started out as a simple idea. Disturbed by the troubled state of the U.S. auto industry and the unsatisfactory results of President Bush’s recent trade mission to Japan, Dr. William Lippy, an ear surgeon in Warren, Ohio, decided to offer his employees $400 to buy a new U.S.-built car.

Then local companies seized on Lippy’s notion that Americans need to “jump-start” the economy themselves instead of waiting for the government to solve their problems and initiated similar programs for their own employees.

Red, white and blue ribbons appeared all over Warren earlier this month, TV crews started showing up, calls began flooding in from around the country, and Lippy found himself on the crest of a wave of nationalist sentiment sweeping the country.

Patriotism-as-sales-pitch is an old concept for American businesses--particularly the auto industry--which for years has appealed to American consumers’ sense of country in an attempt to sell their wares. In years past, industries from agriculture to apparel have pushed the Made-in-U.S.A. theme to combat intrusion from overseas competitors.

But in a movement that is gaining momentum, companies bearing no relation to the automotive industry are rushing to its rescue, reasoning that an upturn in the auto industry will benefit the U.S. economy as a whole.

Many employers picking up the call to “Buy American” have backed up their slogans with hard cash, promising workers and customers up to $1,500 to buy a U.S.-built car or truck. Japanese auto dealers in some areas, particularly the Midwest, say such campaigns have already hurt their sales.

And California dealers worry that they, too, may soon feel a backlash. They point to the anti-Japanese sentiment in a showdown that led the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission on Wednesday to sever its contract with Japanese-owned Sumitomo Corp. to build an automated train for the Metro Green Line.

But sales reports for the first three weeks of January show little sign that the “Buy American” push has helped U.S. auto makers so far. Although this new campaign is more widespread than earlier efforts, studies show that consumers will buy quality merchandise regardless of nationality.

Alarmed by the plant closings GM announced earlier this month, Ira Phillips had already turned bonus payments for four employees at his Hauppaugh, N.Y., lighting fixture plant into gifts of new GM cars. And when Phillips, owner of Quoizel Inc., heard of Lippy’s campaign last week, he decided to offer Lippy’s deal to at least 30 of his 200 employees.

“I have customers all over the United States,” Phillips said. “I can’t be shortsighted. In the general picture, if unemployment stops, it’s good for business. I want to see the auto industry opening up plants instead of closing them.”

Lippy has 35 employees and half of them said they would accept his offer, but only a few have done so.

Mark Jubileer, vice president of Sharon, Pa.-based Reyers, which bills itself as “the largest shoe store in the world,” says he signed onto Lippy’s campaign because his business has suffered from the loss of steel jobs in the area, largely a result of the U.S. auto industry’s decline. In addition, Jubileer notes, the American shoe industry has suffered from foreign competition in much the same way as the auto industry.

“We see what’s going on in the shoe business and in many other businesses in this country,” Jubileer said of his decision to offer his 250 employees a cash incentive to buy an American car. “If more individual American people pull in one direction together, maybe we can beat this thing.”

Independent of the now-famous Ohio doctor, Tosco Corp., a Stamford, Conn.-based petroleum refiner, said earlier this week that it would give each of its 1,800 employees $1,000 toward the purchase of a new American-made automobile during 1992.

And Jess Bell, president of Bonne Bell, a Lakewood, Ohio-based cosmetics company, doesn’t look forward to the steep expense if too many of his 350 employees take advantage of his offer to contribute $1,000 to the purchase of any 1992 GM, Ford or Chrysler vehicle. But after reading news reports of a similar program initiated by Brown Paper Co. of Greenwich, Conn., Bell said he had to pitch in.

“I’m a shot-in-the-butt-with-a-glory-gun kind of guy,” Bell said, “We have to get off the stick and do something to help ourselves.”

What the impact of such incentives might be is hard to gauge. In 1991, Japanese-built cars accounted for 26% of all cars and trucks sold in the United States. But a national survey published by a Detroit newspaper Thursday found that a majority of foreign car owners would consider American cars the next time they buy.

The Detroit Free Press poll found that 50% of the respondents said the recent trade mission to Japan by Bush and the Big Three auto executives made them more sympathetic to the U.S. auto industry’s problems in trying to compete with Japan.

Whether sympathy will translate into sales has yet to be seen, however. In the past, marketing experts say, patriotic verve has for the most part failed to outweigh the quality and price considerations that have steered American consumers toward foreign-made goods.

Unlike the often fickle consumer, states and cities have for years acted as dependable customers for their local industries. According to a 1990 study by the Council of State Governments, dozens of cities and 28 states have ordinances giving preference to or mandating purchases of American-made products.

Pennsylvania and Illinois, for instance, require that public works projects use only American steel. California’s general “Buy American” law was ruled unconstitutional in 1968, although the state still gives preference to U.S.-grown and U.S.-processed foods “when it is economically feasible to do so.”

Blatant disregard for free trade practices notwithstanding, state and local governments have had only limited success in propping up their home industries. And similar industry-sponsored programs have had but spotty success.

The Crafted With Pride in USA Council has spent $100 million since 1985 to push domestic textile and apparel products. Studies have shown that consumers react positively to the “Made-in-the-U.S.A.” label when they see it on display, but the textile industry has made little headway in persuading retailers to sever their traditional relationships with foreign suppliers in favor of domestic manufacturers.

John Hammond, an analyst at J. D. Power & Associates, a marketing consultant firm in Agoura Hills, says the campaign may fuel a short-term surge in U.S. car sales in the Midwest where it is strongest but is unlikely to have a lasting effect on consumer choices.

Hammond cites a study by the University of Michigan taken after the Persian Gulf War, in which 60% of the respondents said they would prefer to buy American, all other things being equal. When asked to assume that the price or quality of American cars were inferior to Japanese, however, only 14% said they would choose an American-made car.

“What that demonstrates is that even when patriotism is at its peak, there is only a very small core of Americans willing to base their purchase just on the origin of production,” Hammond said.

But Susan Thompson, the first employee to take advantage of Greenwich, Conn.-based Brown Paper Co.’s $1,000 incentive program, says she hopes such programs get people to re-evaluate their perceptions of American-built cars. Once happy with her Honda and dead-set against purchasing anything but another Japanese vehicle, Thompson is now the proud owner of a Pontiac Bonneville and an American-car convert.

“I hadn’t looked at an American car for 10 years,” Thompson says. “But for $1,000, how could I not?”

Civil rights advocates are less concerned with how “Buy American” will affect sales than with the potentially dangerous repercussions the thrust could have for Asian-Americans.

The last time the auto industry was posting record losses and linking American products to American patriotism as a popular advertising theme was in 1981. That’s also when Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American resident of Detroit, was killed by a laid-off auto worker who mistook him for Japanese.

“It’s one thing to discuss the issue of the trade imbalance and the economy in a principled way,” said Dennis Hayashi, national director of the San Francisco-based Japanese American Citizens League. “But the whole ‘Buy American’ campaign is starting to edge into an area where it’s really becoming sort of a buzzword for racial emotions related to anti-Japanese racism.”

William Lippy’s son, David, who has indefinitely suspended his management consulting business to handle the newly incorporated not-for-profit “Jump-Start America” campaign, insists that the goal is not to fan anti-Japanese sentiment. “It’s a pro-America campaign, it’s not anti-Japanese.”

Japanese auto dealers across the Midwest, some of whom have been picketed in recent weeks by laid-off auto workers, complain that the nationalist slogans serve to create an atmosphere of cultural intolerance that may pressure consumers into buying something they don’t want.

Dan Lackey, an Asheboro, N. C., Nissan dealer, saw his showroom traffic slow to a halt after the local newspaper printed a story headlined “Buy American: Asheboro auto dealers say that’s the best answer to trade problem.” What bothers him most, he said, is that people don’t realize that 70% of the vehicles he sells were built by American workers at Nissan’s assembly plant in Smyrna, Tenn.

With 40% of the Japanese-brand vehicles bought by Americans now built in the United States, several U.S.-brand models imported from Canada, Mexico or Japan, and still others jointly produced by Japanese and American manufacturers in the United States, many of the companies sponsoring “Buy American” programs are facing the baffling problem of how to determine exactly which vehicles they’re talking about.

Tosco Corp. is consulting with the United Auto Workers union on the subject and plans to publish a clarifying list for its employees. Dr. Lippy’s campaign recognizes any vehicle built with more than 60% U.S.-manufactured parts as an American car, which means that such un-American names as Camry, Accord and Sentra will be included.

Gordon Goudy, owner of Goudy Honda in Culver City, is glad to hear that. But he says the anti-Japanese rumblings from Congress and consumers make him worry about a possible backlash yet to come.

“We haven’t felt it yet,” Goudy said. “But I think about it--because the rhetoric is getting louder, isn’t it?”