Chrysler brand CEO Peter Wong (middle at the Frankfurt IAA last week) plans to pitch Chrysler as a luxury brand. pervious owner Daimler attempted this strategy and has some success with the 300 (top, in 300C SRT8 MY2010 guise) but less luck with the Pacifica (bottom).

Fiat has started to flesh out its market positioning plans for the three Chrysler Group brands, Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep. The drip of information in the run-up to the unveiling of its strategy for the group, due for November, has recently intensified, with a senior executive revealing that Chrysler will chase a luxury position in the market.

Chrysler division CEO Peter Fong foresees the brand being positioned as a luxury competitor above GM’s Cadillac, Toyota’s Lexus and Ford’s Lincoln, being pitted instead against the established European prestige brands such as BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz. This ambitious strategy was hinted at by Fong who said in an interview with Automotive News that he sees Chrysler as being, “a notch above Lincoln, a notch above Cadillac.” Since the early part of the decade GM has put much work and money into repositioning Cadillac, and chasing Lexus sales, but the unit is over-reliant on just one model, the CTS, and like Chrysler, GM has suffered financial meltdown. Ford’s Lincoln brand has also lost ground in recent years, mainly due to an over-reliance on ageing models.

This strategy would be a remarkably bold one for Fiat to undertake, since the Chrysler brand currently has a very poor reputation and its sales have tumbled over the last year. Since taking a 20 per cent stake in Chrysler Group in June and assuming control of its fortunes, Fiat has hinted on occasions that the Chrysler nameplate’s future could be threatened, reflecting a widely-held view amongst industry analysts that three brand names is too many for the new automotive entity.

When German carmaker Daimler bought Chrysler at the start of the decade, it embarked on a very similar strategy, and although it had some successful market acceptance of entry-level premium segment pricing for the 300 series and laid bare its pretensions with the Imperial Concept, the Pacifica was a flop, and the arrival of the unashamedly downmarket and very poorly-received Sebring, with its unappealing low-quality finish inside and out, hammered the final nails into the coffin of this strategy.

However, the electric-powered 200C concept unveiled at the beginning of this year at the Detroit Motor Show, which is expected to give a strong pointer to Chrysler's future design language, was very well received, and Chrysler can look back on a long history of building luxurious cars.

Fong told AN that Chrysler must be much more differentiated from sister brand Dodge, with the latter’s future products expected to be targeted towards better and more sporty driving dynamics. There is the strong possibility of tying this division’s strategic planning up with Fiat’s Alfa Romeo unit, an idea has been mooted by Group CEO Sergio Marchionne, who sees many product synergies between the two that will stretch into future platform sharing and their respective models coming down the same production lines.

Chrysler Group’s third division, Jeep, is likely to remain on a similar path to its present course building an array of off-road capable and SUV-style vehicles, although the range is expected to be fleshed out with new smaller front-wheel-drive only models based on Fiat architecture that will slot in under the current products.