An article in the April 2nd edition of the New York Times was headlined: “Despite Expansion, Mini Says It’s Still a Niche” and confirmed something that had occurred to me at the New York Auto Show.
In New York last week I saw the new Mini crossover, the Countryman, for the first time in person. All the Mini design cues are present in the Countryman and I think you’d be hard pressed to say that it wasn’t part of the Mini family. But I was struck by how “big” it seemed, it didn’t seem small and taut the way all the other models do. Part of the difference was that the Countryman’s ground clearance is higher, so its stance is really quite different than the other Minis.
This got me thinking, at what point does a marque go too far and begin to lose its essential character? Has Mini gone too far with the Countryman?
I suspect this is a little like losing your hair. Little by little your hair recedes, almost imperceptibly, you make little adjustments as you go, thinking no one will notice, until one day you end up with comb-over and people are snickering behind your back. Little by little automotive brands seem to lose their way. (more…)
The big news in automotive marketing this week was that Joel Ewanick is leaving Hyundai and going to head up marketing at Nissan. Hyundai won 2009 marketer of the year under Ewanick’s leadership and the company implemented the breakthrough Hyundai Assurance Program.
The Hyundai Assurance Program was a stroke of brilliance at a time when the economy and the auto industry were in a tailspin. It basically gave consumers a no risk way to purchase a vehicle. If you bought a Hyundai and subsequently lost your job, you could return the car, no questions asked. Truly brilliant and it propelled Hyundai through the recession and out the other end. Hyundai’s 2009 sales grew 8% and its share of market was up 1.1 points. This performance earned it elite status as one of only three automobile brands (Kia & Subaru were the others) to increase volume in 2009, while the industry overall declined 21%*.
The Hyundai Assurance Program was an unqualified success in a tough marketing climate. But now what? (more…)
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.
Toyota has been very successful in the US and has undeniably eaten Detroit’s lunch. Now Toyota has stumbled and you can hardly blame its competitors for attempting to take advantage of the situation.
That said, it’s a good time to pause and take a deep breath, because as so often is true, it’s not what you do but how you do it that matters.
Today’s New York Times has an article headlined: “With Toyota in trouble, rivals gain.” Manufacturers are offering incentives to encourage Toyota owners to come in their stores, trade-in their Toyota for a new whatever. Supposedly these incentives are not being widely advertised and dealers are being encouraged not to “try to take a predatory stance in this type of environment.” According to GM and others, their dealers have requested incentive support. Of course they wanted incentive support, there’s blood in the water.
There are a couple of good reasons to push back against this knee jerk reaction to offer incentives. (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…)
Mr. Muller and Spyker have finally got a deal to buy SAAB from GM (Automotive News 1/26/10). It sounds like Mr Muller and his team understand the importance of a brand’s DNA.
By rebuilding the uniqueness of the SAAB brand they will be able to re-ignite the passion of their enthusiasts and build the business. SAAB will never be a quarter of a million unit business in the US but it can be successful. Forcing SAAB into GM’s”success” model was the problem, now it has a second chance.
Congratulations to Mr Muller, Spyker, and SAAB loyalists everywhere. Finally, an automotive brand that will be coming back rather than disappearing. Like Audi before it, bringing SAAB back in the US market place will be a labor of love and a “mission from God.” Sign me up.
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.
