Three years. That's how long an eight-member GM hit squad's been working on defining The General's eight North American brands. Let's start at the end of The Detroit Free Press article on Liz Wetzel's team in GM's Global Brand Studio. Pom-pom-wielding autoscribe Mark Phelan concludes "…the automaker appears to have a solid product plan and design vision for its other brands for the first time in decades." OK, now, here it is: "Buick and Cadillac owners both have money, but they choose to spend it on radically different things. A Buick owner would be inclined for a quiet vacation on an isolated beach, while Cadillac is more about dressing up for a night out on a weekend in the city. A Pontiac will be designed for the nightlife, too, but for a fashion-forward agenda with pounding bass and flashing strobes. Chevrolets aim to look good as well, but with the effortless appeal of blue jeans and a good shirt, not Pontiac's club-hopping flash. Saab sells cars around the world, so it can speak to a smaller audience: people who consider themselves independent thinkers and want a car with Scandinavian style and environmentally responsible performance. Saturn attracts buyers who wouldn't touch a Chevy or Pontiac with a 10-foot-pole and its theme will build on Opel's European strengths: design, handling, fuel efficiency and interior room." Before you ask, in GM's world, that IS a plan.
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Apparently The Generals Best and Brightest at work. Do they actually get paid for shit like that?
Pontiac and Buick are so damaged as brands that they probably aren’t worth saving.
You miss the point of branding when you forget that the brand represents a product, and the brand will be designed by the product that supports it. Put a mediocre product into a brand and you will have mediocre brand image. Put out decent products for an extended period of time, and you will have a good reputation.
Q: By comparison, what is a Toyota buyer? What is a Honda buyer? A: anyone who wants a good car.
Q: What is a Lexus buyer? Anyone who wants a good car and has more money.
This is why GM is broken. Three years to figure out what their brands are and they can’t figure out that product names are worth anything, and decades to deliver competitive products. I mean, the Volt will be twice the price of a Prius and be over a decade late to market.
I think it’s apropos that the two GM brands which are well defined, GMC and Hummer, are left out of this discussion.
Still waiting for that GM and/or Chrysler fire sale if 6 – 12 months.
You have absolutely no idea how much they get paid for shit like that, millions. And they will have spent money on thousands of individual interviews, research, focus groups and crap.
A TTACer could have put that together in three minutes, tops. But of course they have zillions of data-points demonstrating the wisdom of their obvious.
Even if this is a good way to define GM’s brands–which of course, it isn’t–it means jack shit if the only people who believe it work for GM. They can try to justify having eight brands as much as they like; the public isn’t buying it (or their cars for that matter).
“Saab sells cars around the world, so it can speak to a smaller audience…”
Does anyone besides me see the contradiction in this statement?
“Saab sells cars around the world, so it can speak to a smaller audience…”
Does anyone besides me see the contradiction in this statement?
This is the entire problem at GM!! Everything you here coming out of the Ren Cen is completely North American centric, as if the entire rest of the world is some sideshow.
They spent 3 years of research to state the obvious. What has been done with those brands in that time then? Same old same old??? And no mention of GMC, Hummer, Opel/Vauxhall, Holden, Daewoo etc..
GM is beyond help
I just might be the only one here at TTAC that likes Saturn and doesn’t want to see it dead. To me Chevy and Pontiac are dead, but I am in the minority as the sales #s suggest – compared to Saturn sales, C/P are kings.
The statement “Saturn attracts buyers who wouldn’t touch a Chevy or Pontiac with a 10-foot-pole and its theme will build on Opel’s European strengths: design, handling, fuel efficiency and interior room” applies to me and many others 100%. These are damaged brands beyond help. The G8 seems to be a fantastic car, but I bet more would buy it if it had a Holden badge on it. Badge snobbery or not, it is the reality GM must face for many potential shoppers.
Chevy and Pontiac have a certain stigma attached to it, while Saturn has a touch of Euro flair. Now if they only dropped the nonsense of the no haggle pricing policy (do tell why I have to pay more for a comparatively-equipped Astra than a Mazda3), and I might even consider it. Drove a diesel Astra for a week last summer and really liked it! Too bad about that 1.8L engine…
I just might have to try my hand at In Defense of Saturn, Part 2
That was sad, even by GM management standards
When will people learn that Saturn does not sell it’s cars for MSRP!!! It is a “best price” selling philosophy. That simply means that for the exact same car everyone pays the same price, prices can/are different between Saturn Retailers. Best Price is a hugh advantage to the consumer, a person can easily compare prices/equipment/etc. and make a informed decision. Do any of you think you win the game with companies that negotiate price? Their game is to let you think you win, you do not. The Astra is currently price very aggressively, check them out.
Translating from NewSpeak to English –
“Buick and Cadillac owners both have money, but they choose to spend it on radically different things. A Buick owner would be inclined for a quiet vacation on an isolated beach, while Cadillac is more about dressing up for a night out on a weekend in the city.
Caddy couldn’t compete with MB, BMW, and Lexus so we took it downmarket, canibalizing Buick sales. Despite ruining Buick, Caddy really isn’t doing that much better, but please don’t tell anybody.
A Pontiac will be designed for the nightlife, too, but for a fashion-forward agenda with pounding bass and flashing strobes.
For the past four decades or so, a Pontiac has been nothing but a rebadged Chevy. Now and again we’ve toyed with making Pontiac our “excitement” division, but we’ve never had the balls to say no to minivans or virtual clones of Chevy models. Pontiac sells split grill versions of our other brands.
Chevrolets aim to look good as well, but with the effortless appeal of blue jeans and a good shirt, not Pontiac’s club-hopping flash.
Chevrolet is our best selling division, though it continues to loose market share. The blue jean crowd has discovered that they get more bang for their buck from Toyota and Honda, and we don’t know what to do about it. We survived for a while on appeals to patriotism, and a hot market for trucks/SUVs, but that’s not working anymore.
Saab sells cars around the world, so it can speak to a smaller audience: people who consider themselves independent thinkers and want a car with Scandinavian style and environmentally responsible performance.
We’re just spouting shit here. The above statement has no discernable meaning.
Saturn attracts buyers who wouldn’t touch a Chevy or Pontiac with a 10-foot-pole and its theme will build on Opel’s European strengths: design, handling, fuel efficiency and interior room.”
Saturn used to attract buyers who wouldn’t walk into a Chevy/Pontiac dealer. Saturn used to have a fairly unique car with plastic panels, but now we sell the same shit that other GM divisions sell. The more Saturn becomes like our other divisions, the harder we try to differentiate it in our press releases.
roar1
When will people learn that Saturn does not sell it’s cars for MSRP!!!
The last time I visited a Saturn dealer was to look at the new OpelVue just as it was arriving on dealer lots. 10 seconds with the salesweasel was enough to learn that they were trying to sell this vehicle at MSRP. Needless to say, there was no sale. They probably dropped the price a month later once they realized that nobody pays MSRP.
Back to the article – what GM is doing is perfectly reasonable if they were a young company just starting out. This exercise so late in the game just shows that they have been making up their product strategy on the fly, which explains so much about how they got into the mess they’re in.
As I read their brand definitions, I begin to realize that once they had nailed the demographics they were going after, they force-fit their current brands into those demographics instead of building products that actually match the demographics.
Now the marketing guys will be out there with their ads like a sledge hammer trying to fit their square peg products into the customer’s round hole.
Maybe GM should remember that Pontiac was named for Chief Pontiac who laid siege to Fort Detroit in 1763.
Likenesses of the chief adorned Pontiac hood ornaments for many years. Now the Pontiac emblem is what? An inverted stylized arrowhead?
It’s almost as obscure as Buick’s emblem–three overlapping shields that are empty in fact and in significance.
Hello GM marketing, you might want to look in the Yellow Page for help under “Design, graphic”
I am a loyal GM buyer, a Chevy guy, who sometimes feels that TTAC is overly critical and biased against GM. GM has done plenty wrong, but they are not nearly as bad as TTAC depicts, right?
Well, after years of staggering loses and the statements from senior managment over the past couple of weeks I think GM really is in big trouble.
And now this. Three years and no doubt millions of dollars spent for what – consultant b.s. that says very little. GM should be embarassed to even admit to this little caper – not using it to demonstrate that they get it. Any chance the person responsible for this is in the 20% who will be laid off?
GM has become a bloated, inward looking bureaucracy not unlike a government agency. The corporate culture is stuck in some sort of time warp. They don’t get it.
Cadillac is more about dressing up for a night out on a weekend in the city
Yeah, right. In the dreams from the 1950s, maybe. This crowd drives Lexus, BMW, and Mercedes today. GM neglected Cadillac for so long, its traditional market segment moved on. Then GM decided to bling up Cadillac and sell it to gang bangers with money. Now its image is so poisoned, and the looks of Cadillac have become so grotesque and exaggerated, the more traditional market won’t touch it.
I would disagree with some of the posters on Buick. It has a very well defined market. Old folks tend to be loyal, and every year there are more of them as we live longer. GM just has to improve Buick’s quality of materials and handling. Otherwise, even the old folks will migrate permanently to the imports, and when you lose that segment – the most loyal of all segments – you’re done.
I am amused by the description of Saturn. I think it’s incredibly funny that GM realizes that there are buyers who refuse to consider other GM makes.
Pontiac’s last gasp was the death of their “image” car, the Firebird/Trans Am. Does everyone notice how the new Camaro does *not* have a Pontiac clone?
“Pontiac and Buick are so damaged as brands that they probably aren’t worth saving.”
Buick is doing well in China, and Pontiac is at least getting some buzz with the Solstice and G8, so I’d have to disagree with you, Rix. The brands that need to be tossed like garbage are GMC, Hummer, possibly Saab and certainly Daewoo.
The brands have already been defined by their heritage and history.
GM squandered both and the people currently runnign the company have no idea what any of them really stand for. Plenty of fans out there do, and plenty of them out there don’t.
Based on TTAC’s editorial sometime ago about GM’s brand history it sounds like someone here really understands them too.
The current fashion in branding is to describe the brand in terms of the lifestyles of it’s buyers. Never mind that there are people who sometimes are in the mood for big-city clubbing and other times wish to just curl up with a good book at a mountain cabin.
IMO this lifestyle focus is a bunch of bs, but I don’t get paid the big bucks :( …. and I don’t obsess over US or People magazines like I suspect Liz Wetzel’s team does.
“Saturn does not sell it’s cars for MSRP!”
Uh, yes they do.
“even the old folks will migrate permanently to the imports”
Many have already moved over to Toyota Avalons from what I see, and a surprising number of gray hairs are tooling around in Scions and Honda Elements in our area.
So they’ve defined the brands. Do they think that all of their customers are complete idiots and not notice that this brand paradigm of “differentiation” is largely only skin deep? Sorry but that Saturn customer who wouldn’t touch a car with a bow tie with a 10′ pole then decides to buy it’s twin in the Aura?
Psychographics eh?
Buick is for “lively” elders who enjoy the chime of an activated turn signal for extended periods, and driving to the pharmacy to refill their prescriptions.
Pontiac appeals to the pounding lights/flashing strobes demographic, even if the flashing lights are from police vehicles come to evict them from their foreclosed homes, whose equity has in part served as collateral for anyone with a pulse financing.
In truth, GM builds few aspirational cars, and in all likelihood a classified version of this report focused on the relationship between desirability of the product and viability of the company.
At least Liz’s design background makes her uniquely qualified to suggest changes, and or listen to the product people within the company. Her father was an early voice in the wilderness on the huge technical superiority and design of Japanese automobiles, so I assume there is more to the story. Or a lot of execs have given up and are merely going through the motions.
If this were Honda, I would think that there would be more to the report. I would think that there would be serious polls and metrics about which brands can be saved and which can’t be. And where the ROI on marketing is highest. I would expect hard decisions on what models to cut and what to keep. In other words, a strategy.
But this is GM. They have cash through 2009.If they want to succeed, they need to get through the next three years. Which means they don’t have enough time to fix damaged brands, and win hundreds of thousands of conquest sales. They need to stop the bleeding and stop it quickly with Chevy and GMC. That’s where the real dollars are, and that’s where they need to focus. If they can make it to 2010, they could consider what to do with the other brands. Not at this point.
LOL, another reason not to purchase a GM. They actually pay her and her team!!
I don’t know about the rest of you, but whenever I want a strobe-light filled night with pounding bass, the car I would want to arrive in … definitely Pontiac Grand Am.
A Buick owner would be inclined for a quiet vacation on an isolated beach
Actually, they aren’t all that far off for Buick, given what Tiger Woods did for his wedding.
He also rented out the entire hotel, which has about 200 rooms ranging in price from $700 to $8,000 a night, according to the hotel’s Web site.
The fact that GM needed an expensive study to figure out what the hell its tangle of brands means is the best argument I’ve seen for dumping everything but Cadillac and Chevy.
Wow. They really don’t get it.
Buick and Cadillac owners both have money, but they choose to spend it on radically different things. A Buick owner would be inclined for a quiet vacation on an isolated beach, while Cadillac is more about dressing up for a night out on a weekend in the city.
They should be both types of luxury brands. There are two types: Brands that sell on performance and engineering (Acura, BMW, Audi, Infiniti) and brands that sell on features and style. (Mercedes-Benz, Lexus). Cadillac should sell on performance and handling, since they got the Nurburgring record setting CTS-V, and Buick can sell on just style and amenities, or just be a poor man’s Cadillac. I think that Buick’s image is possibly too damaged from the crap they sold from the early 1980s up until around 2005 to be able to be retooled into a serious M-B Lexus competitor. So they got that one right, kinda.
A Pontiac will be designed for the nightlife, too, but for a fashion-forward agenda with pounding bass and flashing strobes. Chevrolets aim to look good as well, but with the effortless appeal of blue jeans and a good shirt, not Pontiac’s club-hopping flash.
I sat better with Bob Lutz’s idea of making Pontiac a budget BMW. ANYWAYS, if you read closely, she is essentially saying “Yeah, Pontiac will still be a rebadged Chevrolet that we will continue to try to sell to teenage potheads through commercials with neons and bassy beats. It will compete with Chevy for sales like always”
Pontiac needs to die, period. Their image was too damaged when they tried to pedal the cars to teenage potheads back in the 90s by selling cars with pointy spoilers, “speed ridges”, and nausea-inducing interiors, with advertisements asking them to “Pass it on” (the blunt?) Despite Bob Lutz cleaning up their styling and trying to make the brand desirable, it just isn’t anymore. When they picked a brand to kill back in 2000, they should have killed Pontiac and spared Oldsmobile. Olds could still be sold today on its heritage and history of innovation, since it was on longer bumping toes with Pontiac.
And they just don’t get Chevrolet. When will the big three learn from DaimlerChrysler completely fucking up Dodge that your mass market brand isn’t supposed to be stylish or brash or anything. Chevrolet should sell cars that are bland and boring, and have great bang for the buck. That is the exact reason why people buy Hondas, Toyotas, and Hyundais. They don’t buy them for their striking styling or high performance engines.
Saab sells cars around the world, so it can speak to a smaller audience: people who consider themselves independent thinkers and want a car with Scandinavian style and environmentally responsible performance.
Wow, Saab has been so fucked up by GM is brings tears to my eyes. It is aweful. SELL IT ALREADY!!!!!!
Saturn attracts buyers who wouldn’t touch a Chevy or Pontiac with a 10-foot-pole and its theme will build on Opel’s European strengths: design, handling, fuel efficiency and interior room.
Well, used to. Saturn has a great hand of products and a good dealer network. But if they want to survive, Pontiac has to die and they have to bring back all of the special customer service things, like the BBQs and Spring Hill and and no haggle pricing, as well as the whole thing where they will take a picture of you with your new car. In a nutshell, If Pontiac dies and Saturn brings back their “we will take it in the shitter for the customer” attitude, then they can survive.
it just surprises me that GMC isn’t mentioned here. Not even she could come up with a good excuse for it to still be around.
They need to sell Saab, and kill Buick, Pontiac, and GMC. (I hope that they meant it when they said that Hummer’s days were numbered).
GM spends millions on this when they could just read TTAC for free? I guess they got rid of all the people who knew what Chevy, Buick, Caddie, etc. meant for eighty years.
To me the saddest part of the last thirty years is squandering the heritage of Olds, the senior car brand in America, and Buick, the foundation for GM. Incredible brand value–and profitability–gone away. What the two brands represented in their best decades was:
–quality of assembly and finish
–reliability
–engineering talking points (“valve in head”; “Hydra-Matic”)
–distinctive style and well-appointed details but not faddish glitz (1958 was a nightmare!)
–solidity
–roominess
–quietness
–smooth ride
–ample power
–good resale
How much of that remains? Not much that isn’t found elsewhere, and usually more of it.
Where’s Buickman? I think he knows what a Buick buyer is looking for when shopping for a car.
From the article:
Designers are visually oriented, so the studio distilled the images and key phrases to clarify the differences among the brands.
Sounds great on paper, but if all they have is lifestyle choices for potential owners, they ain’t got jack.
The lifestyle of Cadillac belongs to BMW, Infiniti and maybe Acura. Buick: Lexus and Mercedes. Pontiac: Scion on the cheap and Acura on the upside.
I wish I could get paid that much for non-action plans.
I think everyone has it wrong about Buick. The cars they sold from 1990-2005 are some of the best GM cars ever.
Buick’s problem is recent. Dropping the LeSabre and Park Avenue names killed it for them.
Give me a 2000-2005 Park Avenue over anything by GM recently.
Reliability is king.
# windswords Says:
July 20th, 2008 at 9:11 am
“Saab sells cars around the world, so it can speak to a smaller audience…”
Does anyone besides me see the contradiction in this statement?
At first yeah, but I think she meant a smaller audience in the United States because the word audience is followed by a colon and explanation:
“a smaller audience: people who consider themselves independent thinkers and want a car with Scandinavian style and environmentally responsible performance.”
Branding: the second oldest profession in the world. Snake oil is still snake oil no matter how pretty the label is.
I can’t believe Wetzel is still employed there. I met her during the LaCrosse development and I was stunned that an executive of her level was nit-picking over the tiniest surfaces of the doors and instrument panel while missing some rather obvious shortcomings (i.e. formica wood-grain trim circa 1980; too small, numerous and crowded radio and climate buttons).
She must have taken a marketing class and wants to show off what she learned. But this is all horrible, meaningless BS of the worst kind.
Does changing a bow-tie Chevy fascia to a dual-whatever Pontiac fascia on her Aveo/G3 make Liz want to bust out the strobe lights and hit the dance club?
Did anyone else see the GM ads I saw this weekend, on television: Yokons and Denalis with $10,000.00 rebates or $4,000.00 cash and 72 months of zero interest.
“Dropping the LeSabre and Park Avenue names killed it for them.”
That goes across the board at GM and Ford. Killing off so many historic names for the latest fad is just awe inspiringly stupid. Acura, IMO, made the same mistake when they got rid of names in favor of letter jumbles.
How could Pontiac let go of the name Bonneville? What is Cadillac without a Seville, Coupe deVille or Fleetwood? WTF is Buick doing with a car named after Safeway’s house brand dairy products?
Mercury’s MK*, Pontiacs G-spots and the rest are but more examples of ultra high paid marketing jerks making horrible decisions whilst quoting truck loads of bogus consultant inputs. Fire the lot of ’em.
OMG I don’t fit the demographic. I’m 60 years old, retired, don’t like bass booming/strobe flashing, or fashion forward (whatever the hell that means)but I own 2 Grand Prix GTP’s. Well I guess I better sell them and never set foot in a Pontiac store again.
“We survived for a while on appeals to patriotism…”
Good observation.
Exactly why, in 2004, I bought a new (my first-ever new car in 37 years of car/truck buying) Silverado.
Saw the Ft. Wayne plant sticker. Knew some components were from overseas but much of the critter was USA all the way.
My brain said buy Toyota but, at times, following the gut and/or heart is okay, also.
Stupid me.
There is no way to know if my arduous efforts at seeking revenge for Chevy/GMC having spat upon me for failure to repair defects during the warranty period by informing as many consumers as possible about my experiences has been effective or to what extent BUT…
my efforts may have been effective and I learned that many others had similar complaints and were quick to voice them.
I wonder what study group examined that aspect of GMC’s marketing?
Even a sincere apology from GMC may have assuaged my anger but….. nope, nary a word or note or nuthin’ from “corporate.”
A couple days ago I was walking around the Toyota dealer peeking at the vehicles. Did it for the exercize… just walking in a place with things to look at. Struck up a few conversations with other browsers. As typical, I told each person to shun Chevy/GMC since they could experience what I did.
Interestingly, no one has ever defended GMC. And, some of those folks take my warning to heart and thank me for sharing that information. In person, it only takes a few moments to recite the lengthy list of defects and how Chevy just shunned me… “Can’t replicate…”
Too bad, GMC. You can not do to folks what I experienced and expect to stay in business.
Gosh and golly. I’m excited about GM’s new branding. I’m an isolated beach kind of guy, so I guess I’ll go out and get a new Buick. Does it come with a stick?
As typical, I told each person to shun Chevy/GMC since they could experience what I did.
Oddly enough, it won’t take much. Just this past week, my aunt, a lifelong (70 years) Buick buyer, got herself a Corolla. My wife’s aunt traded her Saturn SL in on a new Elantra (which, by the way, I was really impressed at how far Hyundai has come).
So it goes.
I think it can only help GM that they recognize there is no automotive world outside of GM…
Alternatively, when you’re handed a deflated basketball and told to go out and shoot free-throws until your team wins, there’s only so much that one can do.
In defense of Liz Wetzel and her team, I think they actually do an excellent job of hashing out the brands. Her medium is visual as she is part of the GM design team so to take a few of her words and tear her down based on just that is not really a fair assesment. The brand studio is charged with creating an inspiring vision for each brand. If you could see some of the essence videos and imagery they come up with, you’d see the importance of her group. It’s some of the coolest stuff I’ve seen and is meant to specifically raise the bar for the rest of the organization. It’s just a matter of getting the product and message in the media to match that vision. Of course, you have to have the vision in the first place.
One of the great failings in my life is that I haven’t figured out yet how to make people pay me lots of money to spit out horseshit like this. I can just imagine the pride at the meeting where they unveiled these shockingly insightful dollops of brilliance, “After 3 years and millions of dollars, boy do I has some bull for you!” Damn, I need to get me an MBA.
John Horner: the name game is just the surface symptom. If you’re not continuously and productively refining the product, keeping the name is pointless. For example, I know Bonneville only as a latter-day POS Detroit beater. There’s no value in keeping it around if GM wants to attract people under a certain age, unless they want to spend the marketing bucks to link it to the older, vaunted heyday version. Most of the names you mention have this problem.
Acura and Lincoln are different, of course. Lincoln’s products are still so clueless that I have a hard time getting excited in either direction. No matter what you call it, it’s still a tarted-up and uglified Ford. I’d personally like to see a Lincoln Continental worthy of the name, which hasn’t really happened since, what, 1963? I’m sure Ford will get right on that.
Dropping the Legend name so Acura could imitate German naming conventions remains one of the all-time stupidest business decisions made by a Japanese automobile manufacturer, especially since they followed it up with a series of noncompetitive products with ugly styling. Acura won’t die outright, but there should really be an Acura Gaffe Watch.
Regarding Saturn’s “No Haggle” policy. I was ona Saturn lot about four years ago. They still haggle, just in a more covert way, interest rate, cash back, and trade-in value. Sure the price of the car stays the same, but the loan terms and trade-in value can still be negotiated. When you’re desperate to sell cars, that will happen. Only companies like Porsche, Ferrari, etc. can afford a true “No Haggle” policy of here’s the price, either you can afford it or you can’t.
Cadillac: Cars for pensioners getting more than a $4000 monthly check.
Buick: Cars for pensioners getting between $2500 and $4000 a month.
Pontiac: Cars for idiotic 40-something women who think silly plastic cladding and french-sounding model names make a car “sporty.” * Go out to seedy dives dressed in slutty outfits that flaunt their love handles and cellulite, blissfully unaware of their horrid appearance or the fact that no one wants to go to bed with a chain-smoker with sleep apnea.
Chevy: For people who want basic transportation, are committed to “buying American” and are willing to cross their fingers and hope they didn’t get a lemon this time.
Saab: College professors trading in their mid-90s 900s and are unaware the brand is now GM.
Saturn: Gen-Xers who were sucked into the cult in the early days and still drink the kool-aid.
* For this reason, the elimination of plastic body cladding and french-sounding names from Pontiac was a huge mistake.