As General Motors works to re-emerge from Chapter 11, a question has to be asked: Might it be better to change the company’s name?
General Motor’s corporate name has been part of its brand muddle. It perennially struggles with how much to spend on ads centered for its product brands—Cadillac, Chevy, Buick, etc., and how much to spend pushing GM as a brand.
“GM,” which has also been the company’s stock ticker symbol, though, many believe, has become an albatross, like “AIG,” and even “Enron.” No matter how good GM’s new vehicles are, and many are terrific, there is an idea that they will be dragged down in the minds of consumers if they are sold as GM cars.
And GM doesn't have time to waste. It has to get more car buying consumers interested in considering its cars and trucks in the next 12 months or the government bailout of the company will be deemed a fiasco.
Chrysler has, to some degree, faced the same dilemma. But it has decided to keep the “Chrysler Group LLC” name under its new corporate structure, even though there is consideration of doing away with the Chrysler brand in future.
As part of Brand New Day's alliance with the CMO Club, we asked Club members whether the automaker should ditch the “General.”
101 CMOs responded, and 86% said, “No.” An overwhelming majority voted that General Motors should keep its century-old name, even though it connotes failure to a large swath of the buying public.
A few Quotes from CMOs in the club who responded “No”:
“Leading your brand has moved beyond the marketing department. Name changes are marketing centric approaches, leading product (cars), customer service and operational excellence are business centric and what GM needs to focus on.”
“Not until they change the CEO, the union or make other dramatic changes to their culture.”
“No. It takes a much longer to build the name recognition and brand equity of a GM then to turn it around once it is tarnished. If they can survive and really focus on what customers want they can have a great brand again. America loves a comeback story.”
“No way!! It's a great name and an American icon. And with the federal bailout, we all have a stake in them succeeding. If they start making great cars that people want, they'll come back. If they don't, a different name won't help. In fact, it would hurt more.”
“GM's issue is not their name. The only way to rebuild their brand is to build products consumers love, and maybe even have a good experience buying. They haven't done this for a very long time.”
Author Rick Mathieson [Branding Unbound] writes that The Obama Campaign should not have won awards at the International Ad Festival in Cannes.
“Call it the audacity of hype. There's a lot of commentary right now about the Obama Campaign for America winning two Grands Prix in the Titanium and Integrated Lions categories at the Cannes Advertising Festival last week.
But in my opinion, the campaign should not have won these prizes for a couple of reasons:
1. Cannes is about creativity. The Obama campaign was not about creativity, but about strategy - using myriad channels to get out the message and the vote. Sure, there was the idea that strong community building enabled consumers to help build the Obama brand. Yes there was all the text messaging and what not. But there was nothing especially creative about that, or any particular element or mix or elements.
2. Some are arguing the campaign won for effectiveness. Well A.) Cannes has never been about effectiveness - any number of infomercials would win over creative work. And B) though this may sound contrarian, I'd argue there was nothing especially effective about the campaign, despite the candidate's decisive win.
It’s interesting that Mathieson says that the most effective campaign of the last 12 months shouldn’t have won anything. The chatter this year, more than any other, was whether the Cannes festival still carries relevance.
I don’t think, as Mathieson says, that the awards should be about creativity alone, as in creativity of copy, art direction and cinematography. The awards should reward creativity of idea and execution no matter who it is achieved. And divorcing creativity from effectiveness seems like an irrelevant notion to me.
How many times have we seen seriously creative and beautifully executed ads win big awards and have almost no effect on the product or brand? Answer-plenty. That’s why for years we saw agencies enter ads that they created and ran once or twice on cable so they could enter the work in an award show. That’s not creativity so much as it is commercial masturbation.
Having a really well orchestrated, multi-dimensional and creative campaign win at Cannes is a good lesson for the industry.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday unintentionally struck a victory for consumers who don't want their time wasted with bad or irrelevant ads. The high court declined to hear a case about digital video recorder technology, thus making it easier for cable systems to offer services that would bring ad skipping systems to more TV watchers.
The case began in 2006 when Cablevision Systems, the New York-area cable operator, made plans to offer a DVR system in which a customer could digitally record a program, say a football game or American Idol, on a server provided by the cable company rather than on the hard drive of an at-home DVR box.
The technology allows an operator like Cablevision to convert existing set-top boxes into ones with DVR capabilities without installing new equipment in millions of homes. It is, most agree, a much more efficient solution to proliferating more DVR boxes.
But programmers like Turner Broadcasting System’s Cartoon Network and CNN had sued Cablevision, charging the system violated copyright law. In March 2007, a lower court agreed, ruling in the opinion that Cablevision “would be engaging in unauthorized reproductions and transmissions of plaintiffs’ copyrighted programs.” Not so fast, ruled the The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, which reversed that decision. The Appellate Court's ruling is the one that stands now.
Plaintiffs argue that cable systems, by storing the programs remotely, could redistribute them in ways that potentially rob those holding copyrights from their fair share of revenue. That argument didn't hold much water. Arguing what a party "might do" seldom does. Their real cause, of course, was trying to slow down the penetration of DVRs and DVR-like capability, which consumers use to record programs and skip ads.
Networks and cable operators have yet to crack the code of aiming ads at people that aren't irrelevant. In other words, they still can't figure out a way to aim dog food commercials at just people with dogs, and spare the dog-less from 30 seconds of wasted time. I would suggest that is a problem for the networks and cable operators to work out technologically rather than holding poor defenseless dog-less people hostage to watching Alpo ads.
Cablevision said the decision of the court not to hear the case would help make DVRs more accessible, and that programmers and advertisers could, for example, sign agreements allowing Cablevision to insert new ads into recorded content.
Oh Joy. But can I suggest to Cablevision that if that is their plan...might you ask customers to fill out a survey to find out if they own a dog before inserting dog food ads into someone's recording of The Wizard of Oz. And if customers are going to give you that kind of information, make it worth their while by giving them the service for free, while those who want the service ad-less have to pay for it.
The online video created by Droga5 and starring comedienne Sarah Silverman for the Jewish Council for Education and Research won several honors at the Cannes International Advertising Festival this week including a Gold Lion in the cyber category.
The “ad” is a teaching moment for those who choose to learn.
1. It doesn’t look like advertising.
2. It is entertaining.
3. It is totally connected to the issue [product, brand].
4. It spawned huge pass-along in social networking, as in “You gotta see this.”
5. It doesn’t look like advertising.
6. It breaks some rules. [Some marketers can be freer on the Net than on network or even cable TV].
Lesson: if it looks like advertising, people will be more likely to skip it.
I had an e-mail exchange with a top marketing exec at a major company this week in which he quoted the former Coca-Cola chief marketing officer Sergio Zyman to me: The purpose of advertising is to sell product.”
Yes. Okay. But that product won’t be sold unless the public is paying attention. Zyman created a whole lot of advertising in his day that just looked too much like advertising for my money.
I’d say the Obama campaign, plus efforts like this that were created outside the campaign structure, have more to teach marketers these days than just about any other advertising I have seen lately.
Japanese automaker Suzuki has long been the doormat of the U.S. auto industry. The company, known for making very good and competent motorcycles, scooters and recreational three and four wheel vehicles, has long made and sold cars and SUVs in the U.S. that either lack on styling, quality or both.
Who can forget Suzuki’s entry into the U.S. with the Suzuki Samurai, which Consumer Reports lambasted as unsafe back in the late 1980s. Since, it sold the Sidekick. Then came more substantial SUVs like the Grand Vitara. The SUV’s have always felt a bit cheap, with the quality of interior materials always suspect and using poor grades of plastic. But the car side of the business was always a hodgepodge of cheap econo-cars and odd blends of Japanese, South Korean and European influences. The Suzuki Verona, for example, was as anonymous a sedan as I ever saw.
So, it was with a gaping open mouth that I recently saw a TV ad from Suzuki comparing the SX4 to the MINI Cooper. Huh? Wha?
But here is the thing. While Suzuki still can’t style itself out of a paper bag, the SX4 is a dandy little car. While it lacks good fuel economy, the all-wheel drive I quite good for such a small car. I happened to have it as a loaner last winter when I woke up to almost a foot of new snow. I had to get to a TV appearance in downtown Ann Arbor, MI, and the SX4 powered through 12 inches of the wet-stuff in my driveway, street and some of the downtown unplowed streets. I would have hated to have the MINI that day. One of the reasons the SX4 gets crummy gas mileage for such a small car is, in fact, the weight of the all-wheel-drive system. But also, Suzuki, despite seemingly modeled after Honda in many ways, has never made fuel economy a priority in the cars it sells in the U.S.
The other thing long dogging Suzuki has been quality. It has languished near the bottom of J.D. Power’s Initial Quality Study, as well as the firm’s Vehicle Dependability Study. But perhaps that is starting to change. In the new IQS, Suzuki moved from almost dead last a year ago to no. 9 in 2009, above industry average and well ahead of brands that have higher perceived quality, like Nissan, Volkswagen, BMW and Scion. The big reason seems to be the high ratings buyers of the SX4 are giving their vehicle.
Perhaps the audacity of comparing its best rated vehicle against the highly popular MINI, plus some better quality ratings that turn up in Internet research will finally get the public to take Suzuki more seriously. But some better fuel economy ratings and styling that doesn’t look like it came out of a high school art class, plus continued good quality ratings, will help too.
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News, opinions, inflammatory meanderings and occasional ravings about the world of advertising, marketing and media. By Marketing Editor Burt Helm and Senior Correspondent David Kiley.
