OMG! Another dead brand for the second time in about a week!
And, seriously, the order of these articles is random. I didn’t expect to post an article last week about Daewoo only to be posting an article today about Geo.
For you young people who weren’t around in the early ’90s, allow me to explain a bit about Geo. General Motors had developed alliances with several automakers throughout the ’80s. To take advantage of those relationships, GM rebadged several cars from those foreign alliances and sold them under the Geo brand. The title of this article references Geo’s marketing at the time, which centered on the tagline “Get to know Geo” and used the song “Getting To Know You” in many of their commercials.
And although the “Geo” name implies a world-wide reach, all the Geo models were based on cars from traditionally Japanese automakers. The Geo Storm was an Isuzu Impulse. The Geo Prizm was a Toyota Corolla. And there were a couple of other models.
The ad above is for the thrifty little Geo Metro, which was a re-badged Suzuki Swift. It should be noted that the ad above is from 1997, which was very close to the end of the Geo brand. According to everyone’s favorite source of information, Wikipedia, the Geo brand was last used in 1997 and all the Geo models were then branded as Chevrolet cars starting in 1998 (though they were the same cars).
Perhaps it’s because this ad is so close to the end of the Geo brand that the URL listed is chevrolet.com/geo (even in their heyday, Geo cars were sold through Chevrolet dealerships).
(I do like the font they used for this ad! I’m not generally a fan of serif fonts, but this one’s pretty cool. I love how the lower-case letters are just under half the height of the capital and tall letters, and that g in /geo is just great!)
It’s entirely possible that Geo ads featured a different URL in earlier ads, but the handful of Geo ads I found in this endeavor are all from around 1997 and all reference chevrolet.com/geo. If someone has an older ad that shows something different, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
As a chevrolet.com site section, this is what the old Geo site looks like today:
Sadly, unlike other defunct GM brands, Geo gets no special landing page and instead gives the standard Page Not Found page on chevrolet.com.
Well, that’s disappointing. I guess we won’t get to know anything more about Geo.
That said, as far as Page Not Found pages go, I really think Chevrolet’s is one of the best. What a great picture and nice symbolism of a winding road that leads to some lost place.