How much will it take for you to buy a car?

A recent article in MarketingVOX revealed that Saturn spends an average of $1012 in advertising on every car they sell. I thought that was a fairly high number. Apparently, Toyota and Honda spend half that number. Interestingly enough, Saturn sold 213,657 cars in 2005, about half the sales of the Camry alone. Toyota sold over 2 million cars in the US last year, and Honda sold just under 1.5 million cars. Source

I was surprised that the top two car manufacturers still spend so much to sell their cars. Toyota sold 10 times the number of cars Saturn did, but still spends half of what Saturn does on advertising (per car). That's a staggering amount of money spent on advertising considering these cars are the bestselling cars in America, and one would think they would sell themselves. If there were no more ads for the Camry on TV, how much would sales drop? I'm sure it would be a significant amount- Toyota and Honda would not be spending 500 advertising dollars on every car they sold if they did not have to. With all the competition in the car market, a great product is good, but not good enough- it's all the other marketing stuff like customer support, service and advertising that makes them great.