Alfa Romeo needs the products its great brand deserves

Like all major events, the expo has those other brands we already know running through it too. The big boys like McDonald’s and Coca Cola are there with stands, as is coffee maker Illy, which looks to have stumped up the funds to pay for the stands of all the countries it sources from, making them mere extensions of the company brand.

These types of brands, much like big countries, you know what they stand for already, and no matter what they do and what products they make they have a reputation, good or bad, that’s here to stay. Unlike, say, a start-up company or a smaller country, which have to fight for your attention and have a degree of freedom in how they brand themselves.

Alfa Romeo is a big brand. Not a big or successful company, but a big brand. It, too, is in Milan right now, preparing to relaunch itself as a car maker that, at long last, makes the kind of products you associate with the brand.

Like a McDonald’s or a Coca Cola, you know exactly what Alfa Romeo is all about as a brand. But Alfa has for too long been McDonald’s without a Big Mac or Coca Cola without, erm, Coca Cola.

There seems to be an unending amount of goodwill towards Alfa Romeo as a brand, no matter how good, bad or indifferent the cars it makes have been.

Alfa is now promising rear-wheel-drive cars, powerful engines and beautiful styling for its cars - all things you associate with the brand, but none of which has been too evident in its products in recent years.

Let’s hope that tonight’s much-anticipated relaunch of Alfa Romeo as a company brings with it the kind of products and ultimately business success that Alfa Romeo as a brand surely deserves.

Read more:

The full story on Alfa Romeo's relaunch 

Alfa Romeo Giulia - first pictures