Interesting, it doesn't take a marketing guru to see that Mercedes Benz have a brand identity problem. But it's not as cut and dried as Mr. Trout alludes.
In the past Mercedes Benz only made large or sporty luxury cars. Mercedes Benzes were not the preserve of the man on the street.

In a modern age, volumes count and smaller, cheaper mass produced cars are the sure fire way to achieve economies of scale. MB surely recognised this a while back and instituted strategies to diversify their product offerings. Is that so hard to understand, Mr Trout? Do I view Mercedes model line-up as being overly diversified? Perhaps... but I don't view the model diversification as detrimental to the Mercedes brand, instead I feel that Mercedes have lost brand identity through a loss of reputation. Mercs just aren't made like they used to be. In my humble opinion of course.

One could argue that the model diversification is a reason for this, but I find that hard to swallow. There should be no reason why the introduction of a B-Class should negatively impact on the quality of an E-Class. That's just down to bad management and a lack of attention to detail.

BMW? Easy for them right now, in the eighties and nineties BMW had a reputation for building emotive cars that weren't that well put together nor were they expected to last beyond 200 000km. In those days a Merc was for life. So BMW are riding a wave of subconcious buyer acceptance that cars are disposable.