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John Tantillo's Brand Winner.. And Loser: GM and Levi's
Posted by The Marketing Doctor at 6/8/2009 8:40 AM 
Categories: Branding
Tags: Cadillac White Knot Chevrolet Chevy ads Fox Forum advertising GM Chevies brand Opel Toyota branding General Motors Levi marketing Holden target market Tantillo gay marriage Lexus Levi Strauss
Categories: Branding
Tags: Cadillac White Knot Chevrolet Chevy ads Fox Forum advertising GM Chevies brand Opel Toyota branding General Motors Levi marketing Holden target market Tantillo gay marriage Lexus Levi Strauss
Brand Winner… | And Loser |
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John Tantillo’s Winner and Loser of The Week:
Winner: GM
Loser: Levi’s
Folks, I thought the piece I did over at Fox Forum this week was worth repeating as this week’s winner, and then there’s Levi’s making a really jaw-dropping marketing error. So without further ado…
The Winner
I really can’t believe it… Everywhere you look, General Motors is being put into an early grave.
How wrong can you be?
Consumers love their Caddies, Chevies and Chevy trucks. Yes, folks, they love these brands, and it doesn’t matter how much doom and gloom comes over the airwaves and the Internet.
Forget about GM. People don’t buy a company; they buy a car.
GM has some of the strongest car brands in the world, and it’s these brands that will lead GM to profitability over the next five years. Just watch.
Take it from a Marketing man: you ain’t seen nothing yet —as long as the government and the unions let the brands speak for themselves.
In other words, General Motors will need to become “Specific Motors.”
Long before recent events, GM showed that it is capable of building on its strongest brands. Last year, it began making big waves with Cadillac (remember the Super Bowl commercial). This year the company provided more evidence showing it understands its survival depends not on the Federal Government but on rebuilding relationships with its customers.
GM’s long-term strength was the result of meeting the needs of a broad range of consumers, all with different needs and tastes. Remember, how GM used to have a brand for every stage of the consumer’s life? People loved this. My dad reached Buick but never quite got to Cadillac.
Real marketing has always been about discovering needs and then meeting them, again and again. Cadillac did this for years as a leader in luxury innovation —and Cadillac can do it again.
But success depends on remembering that no one cares or should care about GM the company. GM the company is just the physical operation that supports the brands. It’s the GM brands that will drive the recovery. Corporate advertising never works.
I’m assuming that GM’s new ad campaign is just a one-off mistake —not a long-term strategy. The ads look like a lovefest designed to help the company believe in itself (a pointless approach, because this will do nothing for bottom line sales, and they don’t have to sell the American public on a company they already own).
When Toyota wanted to enter the luxury market, it introduced the Lexus. Do most consumers think Toyota when they think Lexus? Absolutely not. Toyota understood that in the case of the Lexus, the name Toyota would be a drag on sales. When people buy a Lexus, they want to get away from Toyota and what it represents (i.e., economy and practicality). They are buying luxury and fine engineering. They are buying a European luxury car that happens to be built by the Japanese.
By the way, GM is already following this same approach all over the world —and where it is doing this, it is succeeding.
Australia’s most popular car is GM, but don’t tell Australians that —they’ll tell you it’s a Holden. Holden is the brand and that’s what people buy —it just happens to be owned by GM. This is also true in Europe with Opel. And if GM listens to what consumers are telling them, they’re going to find the same thing is true right here at home in America.
Americans think in brands.
How will we know GM is going to thrive? When we stop hearing about GM and we start hearing about the latest models and how people would be crazy to buy anything else.
The Loser
Levi Strauss and its “White Knot” program in support of gay marriage.
What are they thinking? Is tying their jeans to a heated political debate a bold and courageous marketing coup?
Short answer: absolutely not.
First, a disclaimer. As usual, my objection is based on real marketing terms and has nothing to do with the ultimate question of gay marriage itself. It’s the marketing that’s on my mind.
Bottom line: Levi’s move is arrogant. As a real marketer, you never want to intentionally alienate anyone or draw the kind of line in the sand that will exclude anyone. (Life being what it is, even the best, most responsive, brands will inadvertently alienate some people.) Why go looking for trouble? And why hurt a segment’s feelings, no matter how small that segment may be?
But intentionally alienating consumers is precisely what Levi’s is doing. They are taking their consumers for granted and telling them what they should think. Wow. As I said above, it’s jaw-dropping.
Is real marketing always inconsistent with all social activism? No. But there’s a huge difference between supporting AIDS victims or orphans in the developing world and taking a well-defined, non-negotiable position on a hot button political/social issue.
There are certain things about brands that are better to let your consumer assume. In Levi’s case, it’s a San Francisco-based company that has a pioneering history in gay rights. That’s great —San Francisco is its home, and supporting gay rights internally is company policy that makes sense.
But as they said in the Godfather: it’s business, and that means staying away from the controversial. End of story.
Projecting internal policy onto the products backs the consumer into a corner where he may feel trapped into an implicit endorsement of the company’s position. It takes the focus off the clothes and makes assumptions about the Target Market that in many cases are probably not true.
The decision also gives the competition a platform to take away market share and opens the door to the unpleasant publicity damage of —that’s right, folks— a consumer boycott. (I can already see the glow from the fires as conservative Christian teens burn their Levi’s in protest.)
Like a doctor, the key to success for a brand before any other is “Do No Harm.” For Levi’s sake, I hope the harm is limited.
And remember, it’s always easier when you keep marketing and branding in mind.
TODAY'S TANTILLO TAKEAWAY -
The first rule of branding: “Do No Harm.”
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