For 1963, Chevrolet shifted gears and redirected its message to the expanding youth and performance market.

The voice in this 1963 Chevrolet spot is a familiar one: He’s Canadian broadaster Joel Aldred, Mr. Chevrolet on radio and TV for many years. But there’s a subtle shift in the messaging and imaging: from solid family values to youth and performance. Yes, we still see families in their Chevrolets here, but these are younger families, and now they’re going places and having fun. Baby boomers were entering the new car market, and while the muscle car and pony car movements were still a year or two away in ’63, we can see the emphasis was already shifting toward style, sport, and performance.

There’s another important trend in full view here: platform proliferation. Traditionally, all Chevy passenger cars were based on a single General Motors platform. Then in 1953 came the Corvette, followed by the Corvair in 1960 and the Chevy II in 1962. “Chevrolet for 1963 gives you four different kinds of cars,” the print and TV ads crowed.

Soon the product line would balloon even further with the Chevelle, Camaro, Vega, and Monza. Chevrolet continued to maintain a healthy market share in the USA, but now the brand needed an increasingly broader product range to hang onto it. Ford and Chrysler were in the same boat. And as Brock Yates (in “The Grosse Pointe Myopians”) and others noted, this trend would have a negative impact on both quality and profitability for the Motor City. Video below.