Over at The Huffington Post, ad man Adam Hanft argues that “Lousy Marketing – Not Lousy Cars – Killed Detroit.” Like most experts (and Buickman), Hanft suffers from blaming the bit he knows best (if you’re a hammer…). But he makes some good points. If Wal-Mart catches flack for paying so little, then why didn’t Detroit seek positive PR for paying too much? More broadly, Detroit’s ads have long been forgettably mediocre (at best) thanks to a stifling creative process. Many ads have targeted an America that no longer exists, if it ever did. Ditto Detroit’s un-fun dealerships. Sure, those for imports have often been at least as bad, but this gave Detroit an opening. Which it failed to take advantage of. Add numerous PR blunders to the mix, along with improving reliability scores, and it’s easy to see why Hanft blames marketing. Except that there’s more to cars than not breaking, and the cars have also had shortcomings. The problem hasn’t been the cars or the marketing. It has been both.
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I think Mr. Adam should watch this Apple Mac ad and perhaps he will see the absurdity of his proposition.
He is right, though you have to stretch marketing into product planning to really appreciate the depth of Detroit’s screw-ups. It’s especially evident now that the cars don’t suck.
Ford is probably the worst: they make cars that are earning quality awards on par with the best, but you’d be hard-pressed to know it. Hell, you’d be hard-pressed to know what Ford sells, given their horrible nameplate shell-game with their own brand and the MK-ization of Lincoln. When asked to name a current Ford, most people will scratch their heads and probably name either the F-150 or Explorer, for all the wrong reasons.
At least at Ford it seems like incompetence: GM still markets and product-plans like it was 1962 and they owned the market. They have some decent cars, but don’t seem willing or able to push them, and the products that are mediocre aren’t improved upon. It’s no coincidence that GM harps on about the “perception gap” as if it’s their customers’ fault. Hint: it’s not. If your customers won’t buy your cars and they’re not bad cars, your marketing sucks. GM doesn’t seem to believe it’s at fault for either poor product or bad marketing. I have no idea how Mark La Neve keeps his job; he’s actually able to make Rick Wagoner look decent by comparison.
Chrysler had a chance: they could actually market, for a while. Now that Daimler’s stripped them of decent product and Cerberus is trying to recover their investment, they’re going nowhere.
Ford or GM could take a play from Hyundai’s book and offer ten-year warranties and consistent value pricing. That they choose not to is either evidence of the marketing departments’ idiocy or arrogance, your choice.
This guy’s ramblings pass for journalism now? I don’t get a warm fuzzy feeling he fully understands what he’s talking about when I see glaring mistakes like these;
“Lee Iacocca, who retired in 1979”
This guy needs to do some fact checking.
The services leave something to be desired, too, falling alarmingly short of what you get in comparable imported dealerships. Quick example: I checked the hours of my local Buick and VW dealers. Buick’s service department is closed on Saturday; how thoughtful of them. VW is open on Saturday, and also opens earlier and closes later during the week.
This also needs a fact check. He finds one example so it’s automatically true everywhere? The service departments at the local Ford and Pontiac/Buick/GMC dealers are open here on Saturday while none of the “imports” are.
In my opinion, the biggest problem with GMs marketing is the muddled branding. Rather than a simple strategy of a premium brand and a value brand they have a muddled mess.
For example Pontiac, supposedly their performance/excitement division, doesn’t get a version of Camaro or the Corvette. They also have two value brand divisions competing against each other. Why should I buy Saturn over a Chevy and vice versa. Why a G6 over a Malibu and vice versa. Is the Malibu boring campared to a G6, but they are the same car so both must be boring. Do the dealers of competing divisions tell you the other brand sucks, so buy one from us instead. They may not be saying it outright, but that’s the message the buyer gets.
The other problem is that the existing brands have a lot baggage because of the past products. So simply dropping to a two brand strategy might not be enough. I think the most practical method of attempting to solve that problem is to convert the Saturn brand to Opel. Shamelessly use the “German Engineered” line. Downplay the GM connection. No GM logos allowed. It may not work, but I think it’s worth a try.
A three brand strategy would leave them with Cadillac as the premium brand, Chevy the value brand, and Opel as a brand for people that get hives or served with divorce papers at the mere thought of buying a GM car.
It would be very hard for anyone to point to anything that the 2.5 have done well.
Not hard at all. They’ve been quite good at burning money, eh?
They are good a making SUVs and pickups in 31 different flavors. You the Wrangler, Suburban and F-150 still lead their respective classes.
Of course now that light trucks are going back to their historical 20-25% of the market from 55-60% a few years ago it does not matter much.
Ford is probably the worst: they make cars that are earning quality awards on par with the best, but you’d be hard-pressed to know it.
That’s because instead of saying they have industry leading quality, they say “hey, we’re as good as Toyota” and then recycle the ‘our cars were so bad nobody will check them out’ “Have you Driven a Ford Lately?” ads.
I don’t know who is more at fault, the car companies or their advertising agencies, but for decades, the Detroit car companies haven’t seemed to be able to make commercials that can tout their “new and improved” products without reinforcing the negative impact previous models have made on consumers, or worse, giving their competitors positive publicity, or yet even worse than that, make their own customers look like idiots.
Here’s an extended look at Detroit 3 ads, with examples (including What’s A Matador?):
http://www.motorobilia.com/2008/11/no-wonder-detroit-ceos-were-pr-disaster.html
The services leave something to be desired, too, falling alarmingly short of what you get in comparable imported dealerships. Quick example: I checked the hours of my local Buick and VW dealers. Buick’s service department is closed on Saturday; how thoughtful of them. VW is open on Saturday, and also opens earlier and closes later during the week.
This also needs a fact check.
Ya think? The most recent J.D. Powers survey measuring dealer satisfaction showed that most dealers, foreign or domestic, were pretty much equal in quality. However, all the domestic brands were better than average and all the major Asian brands were below average.
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/edmunds-confused-by-jd-power-sales-satisfaction-results/
Many dealer holding groups like Penske and Hendricks (and smaller groups, too) own stores from a variety of brands and somehow I can’t see Roger and Rick sending all their bad employees to the domestic dealerships they own.
A lot of folks in these parts disparage the “perception gap”, but the simple fact is that a large number of people allow their anger at Detroit to color how they view reality. It becomes a feedback loop and you can’t convince them that facts are otherwise. They even misquote Charlie Wilson’s 1953 comments about what’s good for the US is good for GM and then use their version of what Wilson said to make GM look bad.
A lot of folks in these parts disparage the “perception gap”, but the simple fact is that a large number of people allow their anger at Detroit to color how they view reality.
And that’s exactly the attitude Detroit doesn’t need, but still maintains to this day. Especially GM: every public pronouncement puts the onus on the customer. And it’s not the customer’s problem to solve, it’s GM’s.
Look, if Hyundai can do it–and Hyundai hit depths of craptitude with the Pony and Excel that GM could never reach–then GM can, too. But Hyundai admitted it was their problem and fixed it. GM hasn’t to this day done a thing to give potential customers confidence. Taking ownership of the problem is one step to fixing it, and it’s a step GM is extremely reluctant to take.
You want to win customer confidence back? Here’s the solution: make a good product and stand behind it. Yes, this will cost money, but so does bleeding marketshare, or perhaps you hadn’t noticed?
They almost got it with Saturn, but chickened out.
@Ronnie: The J.D.Power study cited (btw. J.D.Power gets very irate if you call them Powers, I don’t know why, but they do, they have whole brochure about how to spell their name properly) doesn’t survey dealer satisfaction. It measures the SSI, the Sales Satisfaction Index. As mentioned before, the SSI is “basically a measure of how well the sales droid is doing the paperwork.” A meaningless study. True dealer satisfaction is a blend of how much you like (or hate) the sales guy, and how they are treating (or abusing) you in the shop. And, yes, people allow the quality of the car to color their view of reality. The more often a lemon forces them to visit the dealer’s shop, the lower their esteem of said establishment. Those damn customers are just unable to think logically.
Ford or GM could take a play from Hyundai’s book and offer ten-year warranties
Thet’re better off to charge more & offer 10 yrs W. than these stoopid employees discount.(Except his cars are not to be driven beyond the 3rd yr.)
Afterall we dont mind to pay for quality as lognas u get what u’ve paid for.
Rico Wagoner just didnt get that and still having his Martinis cruising in his Gulf Stream think GM had 50% of the market share.
Or similar to the last days of Fuhrer that the sound proofing in his bunker is so well that he didnt know the Barbarians were already running all over Berlin.
Hyundai was crap in the past, but they were honest about it (in a salesmans way, by having sticker price that was for much less than the competition)
Another point about Hyundai was that they were new which allows you more mistakes
Loser,
Correct on the fact-checking. He was also off on another year. But it’s been clear to me for some time that journalists simply aren’t numbers people, they’re word people.
Ronnie,
See above. Sample size of one per brand? No problem.
As for who to blame: clients generally get the advertising they deserve. As Hanft notes, the process they put agencies through kills all hope for good ads.
psarhjinian :
And that’s exactly the attitude Detroit doesn’t need, but still maintains to this day. Especially GM: every public pronouncement puts the onus on the customer. And it’s not the customer’s problem to solve, it’s GM’s.And that’s exactly the attitude Detroit doesn’t need, but still maintains to this day.
I was at a brunch today celebrating the marriage of a 1st cousin once removed. Someone completely divorced from the auto industry was telling me, “A lot of people really HATE Detroit, just HATE the car companies.”
The worst thing the Detroit 3 can do is ignore that antipathy and act like it’s not there. However, acting as though all that hate is rational is dangerous too. It’s a delicate dance. I know that I sometimes have to disabuse my own customers of foolish ideas (like asking me to embroider black towels with navy blue thread).
Frankly, I think your view that Detroit is putting the onus on customers is an example of someone’s distaste for the domestics clouds how they see things. In your eyes, Detroit can do nothing right. Anything they say or do is just another cause to slam them.
Those damn customers are just unable to think logically.
Bertel, consumers are not rational actors. That’s why so much marketing is focused at getting an emotional response.
As for J.D.Power, the reason why they have a brochure about how to spell their name is the same reason why owner’s of IP are so agressive: trademarks are valuable things and they want to be sure they aren’t diluted. Most big companies have all sorts of internal guidelines on logo use. DuPont insisted that it be spelled with a capital P and that their oval logo had to be against a white background with a certain amount of surrounding white space. Back in the 70s, before they gave up because it was a fruitless endeavor, Coca Cola used to write a letter to every publication that referred to cocaine as coke, telling them that Coke was a registered trademark. Velcro™ does the same about “Velcro brand adhesive fastener”.
RE: The Hyundai example of turning around consumer perception
While Hyundai sold junk when they entered this market, their sales numbers were nowhere near what the Detroit 3 were selling in the 1980s and 1990s when they were busy pissing off all those folks who now won’t step foot in a domestic dealer.
Most consumers who buy Hyundais these days don’t even know what kind of junk they started out with. Hyundai entered the US market in 1986. Sales peaked in ’88 at 264,000 but declined rapidly as people got turned off by poor quality, and dropped to less than 110,000 cars a year until they turned things around with better designs and better quality. Compare that to the millions of cars sold each year by the domestics. The domestic disenchanted a larger number of people over a much longer period of time than Hyundai.
I’m not saying that better warranties won’t help, I’m just saying that domestics have a much steeper and higher hill to climb.
Still, there’s some hope. There’s something I like to refer to as the “Trini & Carmen’s” theory. It’s a variant on there’s no such thing as bad publicity. There’s a Mexican restaurant in suburban Detroit named Trini & Carmen’s. They do pretty well these days. I like to ask people if they’ve ever heard of them. Usually people say, yeah, I’ve heard the name. The thing is that they don’t remember the context in which they heard the name, a 1977 incident that put 59 people in the hospital due to botulism poisoning by some home-canned peppers. It was a huge story 30 years ago. Now, people only remember that they recognize the name.
GM didn’t poison anyone, just people’s attitudes about GM, so maybe they can turn their brands around. They’re still the sales leader in the US so they do have something to build upon.
Somebody will buy Hummer, Pontiac and any other brands that GM puts on the block.
Firt, there is more to marketing than just advertising.
When thinking of the promotion portion, I can’t really point to any particularly memorable ads by Toyota or Honda any more than I can anyone else. Frankly, their continuous “toyotathon” ads are tiring and hopelessly old-fashioned. Nearly every car company runs variations on the same themes: car driving on fantasy curvy road with no traffic, car driving in desert with no traffic but a nice plume of dust (that never sticks to the car), truck bouncing along dirt roads or rocks… with no traffic, car driver getting attention of fantasy hot spokesmodel, or car being driven by fantasy spokesmodel (or famous athlete) who, in real life, wouldn’t be seen dead in said car.
Yes, domestic auto advertising has been for the most part uninspired (except perhaps for those for Saturn by Hal Riney & Partners in the early days) but so have the campaigns for nearly everyone else as well. There are some exceptions (Mini, early VW, etc.) but they usually had products that were equally interesting or iconoclastic.
One problem GM in particular has is that they have too many brands and products to support effectively with marketing dollars. Even though they spend a lot, they must have a dozen mid-sized cars to try to market while Toyota has 2. Additionally, many of the cars are nearly identical under the skin, so there is only so much advertising can to do set them apart. You may put lipstick on the pig, but consumers quickly find out it’s still pork.
Then, when it comes to distribution, they have too many dealers competing with one another. Saturn’s real untold genius is in the way their dealer network was set up so that they don’t have multiple Saturn “retailers” in the same town competing with one another on price. Otherwise, GM still has a dealer network sized for a 40%+ share of the market so all most shoppers see are ads reducing the brands to prices and starbursts. Saturn had decent marketing but it could only go so far after they were starved for new products to sell.
Additionally, when it comes to the prices that that the OEMs set, they have basically gotten themselves into a ditch in which consumers are always waiting for the next round of discount programs. They can’t figure out how to get out of their own hole. Frankly, this is also the case for some import brands. I can’t think of a way to break this habit, either, frankly. Every time they try to stop there is too much pressure to meet the monthly sales quota and they go back to the tried and true. If the local furniture store has a huge blowout sale every weekend, it’s no wonder that nobody shops on Wednesdays and the whole idea of a retail price becomes laughable.