Who should be embarrassed? The auto industry and their communications agencies.
If you haven’t had a chance to see the documentary “Art & Copy,” you must. Last night I saw it for the second time and enjoyed every minute. If you have worked in the advertising business or are responsible for advertising on the client side it is well worth seeing.
It’s a chance to see some of the most talented people in the agency business talk about what makes great communications. Hal Riney, Mary Lawrence, Jim Durfee, Lee Clow, George Lois, Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein, Dan Wieden and others talk about what they think represents great work and what inspires it. They talk about great ideas: Braniff’s End of the plain plane, Apple’s 1984 and Think Different, Got Milk, Reagan’s re-election campaign, Nike’s Just Do It and VW’s Think Small among others.
At the end, these people and the work leave you inspired. You’re reminded that at its best, advertising can change opinion, entertain, move people emotionally and to action. Great work respects people and treats them decently. Great work can build brands, companies and value. Great work is really hard to create, get approved and execute, but when it all comes together, it can move mountains.
My last post regarding BMW’s new campaign resulted in a few conversations with colleagues that were interesting and got me thinking about the challenges associated with marketing a global automotive brand and the concept of a global campaign.
Virtually every automotive brand is global. Not every brand is marketed in every country but I can’t think of any that are sold only in their country of origin. That means that every manufacturer must be concerned with what their respective brands stand for in each country in which they are distributed. Obviously, it is in the manufacturers’ interest to have their brands positioned in the same way from country to country. Customers and prospects should recognize the brands no matter where in the world they come into contact with them.
Of course the real world is not quite this neat and tidy. Brands have developed in different ways in different countries, so for some manufacturers it’s a challenge just to get their colleagues around the world on the same page regarding the brand’s core values. In my experience we do pretty well when we concern ourselves with the strategic underpinnings of the brand, where things fall apart is when execution of the strategy is considered.
There seem to be two basic approaches to execution, each with its own set of plusses and minuses:
It has a feeling of inevitability attached to it, but still, I can’t help but feel let down. For years many of us have held up BMW as the example of a car company that understands its brand and sticks to it. That all just changed. BMW is no longer the manufacturer of The Ultimate Driving Machine, according to this commercial “at BMW, we don’t just make cars, we make joy.”:
The longest running and probably best known automotive industry positioning line has been thrown in the bin in favor of “Joy.” I’m conflicted. On one hand, I’m shocked and I really believe that BMW has made a horrific mistake, but on the other hand, there are aspects of this new campaign that I like.
“The new “Joy” campaign ‘is a big departure for us,’ said Jack Pitney, vice president of marketing for BMW North America. ‘We hope to really add some humanity to our brand’ and show the diversity of its buyers,” — Wall Street Journal 2/15/10
In fact, what I like about the commercial is the humanity. It’s fun to watch people enjoying life in and around their BMWs. To see enthusiast communities enjoying their passions together. To see all kinds of people, some even like me, joined together by a common bond created by a car. It is truly what makes great automotive brands great, that sense of being part of something bigger than you are.
The sentimental favorites won the Super Bowl…at least the football game part.
Generally speaking I thought the advertising game within the game was just OK, not great. Within the automotive segment, six manufacturers stepped up for the Super Bowl:
As I said in an earlier post, the tough part about advertising in the Super Bowl is that while the football game is the primary draw, the advertising contest comes in a close second. As an advertiser you have to be willing to do work that will stand out and entertain because the very next day the “results” of the ad contest will be published in USAToday.
I always watch the Super Bowl hoping that one or more of the automobile manufacturers will break out of the category mold and amaze us. Here’s my take on the automotive commercials, from best to worst: (more…)
Toyota is in deep stuff given the allegations of unintended acceleration, several huge recalls that will cost BILLIONs of dollars, continuing investigation by NHTSA, civil penalties, reduced sales, weakening brand image scores and deflated residual values.
There has already been plenty written about the impact of this on Toyota’s brand reputation. It certainly is going to set them back, some pundits say it’s a “speed bump” for Toyota, others say the situation will effectively “kill” the Toyota brand. I suspect that the “truth” will be somewhere in the middle, the Toyota brand has been damaged, it will take a good deal of time and effort to recover, but it will recover.
Rather than debating the current health of the Toyota brand, I’ve been thinking about the discipline of branding in the automotive category and what its practitioners can learn from Toyota’s experience. Certainly the need to manage the media and to do so in a transparent way is critical. Time is of the essence, the internet can take your reputation and spin it out of control in a heartbeat. Beyond the crisis management learnings, I think that we are seeing the danger of having a brand that is based solely on rational underpinnings. (more…)
There’s an interesting piece in this week’s Adweek by Dean Crutchfield, Chief Engagement Officer at Method: “A Brand by Any Other Name…”
He posits that one of the issues with “branding” as a marketing discipline is that we lack an agreed-to definition, which subjects it to interpretation based on circumstances or agendas. He closes by saying that agencies and marketing services firms need to more tightly define branding:
“If we don’t address this, we could be perceived as an industry made up of people who don’t know how to define what it is they’re not supposed to do. As Grouch Marx would have told us, ‘These are my principles; if you don’t like them, I have others.”
Leaving aside the issue of agency credibility, the automotive industry needs to dedicate itself to building or re-building its brands. Manufacturers who do will succeed in the hyper-competitive “new normal” automotive marketplace, while those who don’t will languish.
The automobile business has traditionally had a shaky relationship with the idea of “branding.” Programs designed to define or position the “brand” are often perceived as the “soft” part of automotive marketing. This perception is in contrast to the marketing specifically designed to drive traffic to the stores or in industry parlance “make the doors swing.” Often manufacturers feel that they have to choose between “branding” and “retail” and more than often than not they choose retail.
I think that part of the problem with the discussion of “branding” in the automobile business is that it most often devolves into a discussion of advertising, as in “this is a brand ad, that is a retail ad.” Brand ads are the ones that attempt to speak to a company’s “values” whereas retail ads feature “product, place and price.” This either/or conversation is specious and has led the industry to it’s current situation, products that are perceived more like commodities and customers who focus on pricing.
Let’s be clear, in the “new normal” automotive market the traditional brand vs. retail discussion is a path to commodity status, decreased sales, decreased profitability and the loss of already weak brand equities. The truth is, every successful automotive competitor will do both jobs, build brand leverage and make the doors swing.
The marketing conversation needs to start in a different place and I agree that it needs to start with a definition of what we mean by “brand.” (more…)
Here it comes again, another automotive luxury brand seeking to have “wider appeal without tarnishing the image” (Automotive News 1/11/10).
Lexus is concerned that their customers are too old and they are not appealing to the next generation of luxury car buyers. A reasonable concern.
Lexus appears to be addressing this concern in the usual way that automobile manufacturers do.
First, you add product to your line-up that is designed to meet the requirements or interests of the new target group (after all, they’re very different from the current customers), then you lower the cost of entry into your franchise (they don’t have as much money as the current customers) and finally use marketing to convince the younger target that your brand is cool (at least cooler than they think it is).
Unfortunately, this approach always has the same result, you may succeed in selling a few more cars to the new target group but you leave your current customers confused and your brand weakened.
The Automotive News article even quotes Jessica Caldwell from Edmunds.com who says: “Lexus was really strong, but they have lost their footing….BMW is the ‘Ultimate Driving Machine.’ We’re not really sure what Lexus is.” I agree with her. The overheated luxury segment experienced so much growth in the ’90s and early ’00s, that many of the luxury marques that were fortunate enough to have clear positionings in the beginning were weaker and less distinct at the end of the run-up.
The 2010 Super Bowl may or may not be a good football game, but there will be a whole bunch of automotive commercials to watch. Here are the six manufacturers who will be advertising on this year’s extravaganza:
With 2009 behind us it will be fascinating to watch what each brand does with their piece of the most expensive advertising real estate in the world. The Super Bowl represents an incredible opportunity to reach the biggest television audience of the year. Brands that have used the opportunity well, have in some cases changed their fortunes…Apple’s introduction of the Mac comes to mind:
Here’s the challenge with the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is not just the game that decides the NFL champion, it has become the crucible in which winners and losers are defined in the advertising business. USAToday will not only report who won the game, they rank the advertising gladiators. There’s a lot at stake for the agencies and their clients.
As an industry we’ve lost sight of our great brands. In some cases companies have gone bankrupt or been acquired and a brand disappeared, in others a world war got in the way. Studebaker, Cord, Horch, MG, Triumph and countless others have evaporated for a variety of reasons.
Today, as Detroit goes through an unprecedented upheaval, there will be more brands lost. Saturn, a once very special brand, will go away. So will Pontiac and Hummer. We can only wonder what will happen to brands like Jeep. Brands that stood for something, had a point of view, and marketed products that reflected a certain perspective. Brands that developed a loyal following because they stood for something! They weren’t for everybody, and that was OK.
As discouraging as it is to see a great brand go away because of a structural change in a company, it’s worse to see brands die of neglect by the very people charged with protecting and building them. Over the last 20 years we have watched a number of great automotive brands that automotive marketers worked very hard to create, begin to whither away. The aforementioned Jeep is one, Volvo another. Mercedes Benz, Jaguar, Land Rover, SAAB, Lexus and even mighty BMW feel somehow “less” than they did even ten years ago.
What’s happened? Expansion happened. Chasing volume happened. Brands that meant something specific and clear found themselves needing to be “more.”
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