AUBURN HILLS, Mich., Aug. 15 — From the executive suite to showroom lots, Chrysler L.L.C. is wasting no time in trying to persuade customers that it has come out from under the wing of its former German owners.

On Wednesday, Chrysler said it had hired Deborah Wahl Meyer, vice president of marketing at Lexus, the luxury division of Toyota, as its new vice president and chief marketing officer. She will start Aug. 28.

Her appointment came just 10 days after Chrysler’s new owners, Cerberus Capital Management, hired Robert L. Nardelli, the former chief executive at Home Depot, to run the auto company.

Ms. Meyer’s appointment was announced as Chrysler dealers across the country planned to celebrate “the New Chrysler,” as the company calls itself on its Web site, in its advertisements and in company literature, at events planned at showrooms nationwide on Wednesday night.

Ms. Meyer succeeds George Murphy, a former executive with General Electric and the Ford Motor Company, who left Chrysler in May, shortly after it was sold to Cerberus, a private equity firm. The deal closed Aug. 3.

Chrysler did not make Ms. Meyer available for interviews, but Jason Vines, the Chrysler vice president for corporate communications, said she would bring “fresh eyes” to the company, which lost its traditional No. 3 spot in the American market last year to her former employer, Toyota.

“She thinks this is just such a great opportunity at this time,” Mr. Vines said. “She likes game-changing stuff. Obviously the game has been changed here with private ownership.”

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Cerberus bought 80.1 percent of Chrysler from its former parent, DaimlerChrysler, which is keeping a 19.9 percent stake.

The sale came nine years after Chrysler and Daimler-Benz merged, and ended an era in which Chrysler lost market share and went through a roller coaster ride of profits and losses, including a $1.5 billion loss in 2006.

Despite a recent rise in auto sales, credited to 10 new vehicles introduced in the last year, Chrysler fell to fifth place in the American market last month, behind General Motors, Toyota, Ford and Honda.

Moreover, its marketing operations have been something of a revolving door. Mr. Murphy’s predecessor, Joseph Eberhardt, left the company in 2006, after angering dealers by pushing them to accept more vehicles than they could sell.

Many refused to take more cars, and at one point last year, Chrysler had more than 100,000 vehicles parked on lots in the Detroit area for which it had no dealer orders.

To win customers back, Ms. Meyer must show that the company is different, not only from its previous incarnation but also from its American competitors, said William J. Ward, a professor of marketing at Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y.

“A lot of the U.S. brands, including Chrysler, lost any distinction and became kind of generic,” Professor Ward said. “They’re going to have to reconnect with the customers and re-establish some kind of differentiation between themselves and their competition.”

Mr. Nardelli’s arrival last week coincided with a marketing campaign based on the theme, “The New Chrysler: Get Ready for the Next Hundred Years.” (It does not say what will happen after 2107.) The campaign, in newspapers, magazines and on the Web, is planned to run through Aug. 31. The campaign was created by BBDO Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group.

One ad, planned for newspapers, magazines and Web sites, gives a brief history of the company and tries to explain “why the next 1,200 months look so promising for us.”

Another print ad, featuring pictures of three babies in car seats representing the Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep brands, asserts the carmaker is “ready for the next generation.” Radio commercials stress the same theme.

The campaign also highlights Chrysler’s new “lifetime” warranty for engines and transmissions, by which the company promises to repair defects as long as the vehicle is owned by its original buyer.

Mr. Vines said neither Ms. Meyer nor Mr. Nardelli had indicated what direction the company’s marketing efforts would take. The trade publication Advertising Age speculated this week that Mr. Nardelli was likely to reduce the automaker’s marketing budget.

At Home Depot, which Mr. Nardelli left in January amid shareholder unhappiness, ad spending in the United States fell to $524 million last year, a 20 percent drop from 2002, Advertising Age said. Mr. Nardelli joined the company in 2001.

But Mr. Vines disputed that assessment, saying there was no way to compare ad spending at a home improvement company and at an automaker like Chrysler, which spends billions of dollars a year on marketing.

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Ms. Meyer is from the Detroit area and has worked in marketing for the Ford Motor Company and Mazda North America, of which Ford has management control.

At Toyota, she tried to promote the Lexus brand with subtler placement in television and print media, as well as in traditional commercials.

“We have to be more a part of what people are watching and reading instead of being in between what people are watching and reading,” she told BusinessWeek in 2005.

Ms. Meyer asked magazines to use Lexus vehicles essentially as props in photographs for articles unrelated to the company or the auto industry, a tactic criticized by some media industry reporters. She told BusinessWeek that “ideas can cross between advertising and editorial. It doesn’t always need to have the ‘advertorial’ note on top.”

Lexus also scored a coup by signing up Paul McCartney, who let the brand use his song “Fine Line” in ads for its RX 400h, a gasoline-electric hybrid sport utility vehicle, the first time Mr. McCartney had worked with a commercial brand.

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