All full-size pickup truck manufacturers (Ford, GM, Chrysler, Nissan, & Toyota) offer luxury versions of their standard offerings. GM has two pickup truck brands, Chevrolet and GMC. GMC has long been the more luxurious of the two, however Chevrolet sees room at the top of its range for a GMC-grade model. Fears that an upmarket Chevy will cannibalize GMC sales are unfounded says Maria Rohrer director of product marketing at Chevrolet. According to Rohrer brand loyalty is more important than features for Chevy truck buyers and a Silverado buyer will forgo amenities to have the Chevy brand. Clearly there is room for the high-trim Silverado High Country, however the underlying architecture and power plants of the brands are the same. Differences are exclusive to cosmetics and some features, but the trucks are essentially identical.
http://wardsauto.com/vehicles-amp-technology/gm-sees-room-two-atop-large-pickup-lines
One challenge GM faces is that as an assemblage of brands a century-plus back, GM needs to decide which product should be sold under what name. Despite cutting brands in bankruptcy, it still had lots of stand-alone GMC stores and Chevrolet stores so was reluctant to consolidate into a smaller number of brands. It didn’t want to let GMC dealers sell Chevy’s as it would result in dealerships right next to each other. It didn’t want to simply axe GMC as it would result in too few dealerships. So now they’re stuck with overlapping ones.
I see the place for standard and luxury pickups, but Chevy and GMC are far too similar to my mind to justify having both brands. GM’s done away with brands before, if they axe GMC as a brand I have difficulty seeing a shortage of dealerships as being a problem. Chevy is an enormous brand with many dealerships, perhaps Chevy dealerships would need to expand sales and servicing operations a bit, but GMC is nowhere as large as Chevy as a brand. Some areas might suffer from a shortage of dealerships, but the benefits of consolidation at a company level should be great enough to justify streamlining.