Platforms: engineering panacea, marketing disaster?

For the global automotive industry, platforms are the panacea of the 1990s, the perfect way to combine economies of scale, globalisation, multi-branding, and rapid rates of new product introduction. This paper explores the production and marketing logic of platform strategies within multi-brand constellations. The production logic of platforms is demonstrated together with the implications for steel supply. However, attention is also drawn to the potential problems with platform strategies.