100 Days of New GM: Marketing/Communications

[nsap]

100 Days of New GM: Marketing/Communications

Lead Editor: Sigma
GMI Staff Member

Editor: MonaroSS
GMI Contributor

Editor: Nick Saporito
Nsap
Editor-in-Chief

This has been, perhaps, the most difficult of the sections to write about how General Motors is progressing 100 days after its bankruptcy and restructuring. For so long, General Motors marketing has been so incompetent - their inability to market was matched only by the mediocrity of their cars. Even as GM’s products improved, their marketing did not.

GM’s marketing has been plagued by three key problems.

1)The deal: GM’s insistence on marketing the deal instead of the product. GM never figured out marketing the deal is absolutely pointless unless you manage to tell consumers why they should want this product beyond the reason it’s really freaking cheap (or much cheaper than the competition). You are selling a car people will use for three or five years – not a box of cereal at WalMart.

This ultimately culminated in “Employee Pricing” promotion, a disaster that helped to trigger a binge/bust auto consumption cyclical that seriously hurt GM’s image and sales for years to come. You can’t give away the store one month and expect people to pay the full asking price the next month.

2) Follow through: GM’s plethora of brands and overlapping product lines (Aura, Malibu, G6 anyone?; LaCrosse, Impala, Grand Prix? ect. etc. etc.) meant no one product would get the marketing funds it needed to successfully launch in a very crowded and highly competitive field. Moreover, not only wasn’t their the necessary cash to launch the product – there was almost zero follow through after the launch to continue to establish the product in the marketplace. Continued marketing is key to the success of any product, especially products in highly competitive segments such as the compact and family sedan. Yet, how many of you have seen an ad for the Malibu just a year after its launch?

Ford, for example, does this completely differently. They have rolled out the new Taurus and its launch ad campaign, but they haven’t done this at the expense of advertising other Ford products. Vigorous ad campaigns continue for the F-150, Fusion, Fusion Hybrid and Focus. This continued marketing is key to building mindshare for their products in the minds of the American consumer. You must continually advertise your products or the public will forget about them.

3) Selling GM: GM’s constant efforts to sell cars by selling the idea of General Motors doesn’t work. It’s never worked. Proctor and Gamble doesn’t sell toothpaste, Crest sells toothpaste. General Mills doesn’t sell cereal, but Chex does sell cereal. Yet, General Motors insisted for years, wasting billions of dollars that would have been better spent talking about the cars and brands the holding company has, rather than the holding company itself.

One of the most positive changes that came out of the restructuring of General Motors was putting Bob Lutz in charge of marketing. Since he has taken over the post he has made statements, which sound oddly definitive and intelligent for a GM marketing chief. Lutz has promised to stop marketing General Motors name, devoting more resources to the remaining brands and products. He's said previous GM marketing attempts were scatter-shot and didn’t focus on the product at hand, the cars. Lutz killed Buick’s new ad campaign featuring the hideously stupid “photo shoot” commercial for this reason. Additionally Lutz has elected to keep Chevrolet's Howie Long ads and just recently told Cadillac's ad agency, Modernista! to take a hike. Lutz and GM have not yet selected a new agency for Cadillac. GMC appears to be maintaining its "Professional Grade" marketing strategy, which is arguably the only brand that GM has been able to successfully market over the last 20 years. All of the changed Lutz has brought to marketing are encouraging signs to us at GMI.

May The Best Car Win

One of the first signs of Lutz's new reign on marketing at General Motors was their recently-launched May The Best Car Win campaign. The campaign launched concurrently with GM's 60-day satisfaction guarantee incentive that allowed GM buyers to return their vehicle within 60 days of the purchase if they did not like it. Their introductory piece for the campaign was a commercial with GM's new Chairman, Ed Whitacre. According to Lutz the Whitacre ad will be the last commercial marketing the General Motors name.

Beyond the Whitacre ad GM launched several 30 second and one minute spots touting their successes versus the competition. All of the ads had an immensely simple setup (blank background, generally fairly "blah"), but the message was clear in all of them. Overall we have mixed opinions on the campaign, however Edmunds Auto Observer reported that they noticed a 10% increase in consideration of GM product right after the ads launched (1). The ads are intended to get the public to think about GM products and get them to question just how good they are compared to the perception that most Americans posses.

We feel the spots are quite acceptable for their purpose, to change the public's perception, but beyond that we would much rather see some exceptional ads touting new brand images. This campaign is really all about a GM-wide campaign and does not really reflect how New GM is going to market the individual brands going forward, which we are far more interested in.

Mixed Messages

Beyond the May The Best Car Win commercials, GM has released a few spots for the new vehicles under their respective brand's image. A prime example of such is Cadillac's new ads for the 2010 SRX; called "Stills" and "Facets" (2). We like that the ads are actually focused on the car and the changes in it from the previous SRX-- and the fact that GM selected a popular alternative music track for it--but beyond that we were not overly excited with either spot. Both ads end with calling the SRX the "Cadillac of Crossovers," a tag line we at GMI really like, but what is Cadillac's tag line now? It was "Life. Liberty and the Pursuit," which we haven't heard in sometime. Cadillac is in terrible need of another "Breakthrough" campaign that goes brand-wide.

Additionally, Buick debuted a new 2010 LaCrosse ad that touted the brand's apparent new tag line: "The New Class of World Class." The ad itself was very good. It was a simple taping of the car stopped at an intersection with several beauty shots taken of it in the process. Just like the Cadillac ads, GM utilized a hip alternative track for it (2) and filled the ad with people and on-lookers that appeared youthful. We feel like the ad was a success and was hitting home with the demographic Buick needs to resonate with. Now GM just needs to continue with more ads like that going forward. In the last 100 days we have seen a trend at New GM: Buick appears to be the only brand with it's collective head on straight and with a sharp brand focus. We expect big things from Buick going forward, even in marketing. Although we're not quite sold on their new tag line...shouldn't Cadillac be GM's "world class" brand?

Another downfall we have noticed in the last 100 days regarding marketing efforts is the lack of commercials for the 2010 Equinox and Terrain that did not fall in the May The Best Car Win campaign. To our knowledge there has been one Equinox commercial unrelated to the campaign, however none for the Terrain. These are two of the best GM products ever, they need to be touted. We would like to see Terrain ads sporting GMC's "Professional Grade" marketing; touting the Terrain's long list of standard features (Bluetooth, XM, rear-view camera, USB port, etc.). As for the Equinox, let's see some ads comparing it to the competition, since it excels in just about every regard.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been enough time for GM to develop and release its new ad campaigns for Buick, Cadillac and Chevrolet for us to get any sort of reasonable idea about how well GM will execute its marketing under Bob Lutz, who had promised to blow things up. Ultimately, Lutz will be judged on two criteria: First, was he able to fix GM’s marketing so it actually moves cars and repairs the tattered image of GM’s brands? Second, blowing up a system that isn’t producing the desired results is easy – replacing it with a system that ensures GM continues to make strides in tackling its marketing and advertising problems is significantly harder. Was he able to implement such a system, or does he will it with the force of his personality? If it’s the latter, the second he leaves the company expect GM to return to its old ways.

The changing face of GM Communications

GM Communications

In today’s world of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and all of the other various mediums of social media, marketing and communications almost go hand in hand. General Motors pioneered in-house corporate communications back in the 20th century to have more control over what was reported on the automotive giant. Communications is an area in which those of us at GMInsidenews (GMI) can discuss fairly extensively because we have dealt with GM Communications at the 'Old' GM and now the New GM. Thus far it is probably the most noticeably changed department in the company since emerging from bankruptcy.

The main area of GM Communications that we find so striking is that the company is truly focused on hearing from customers directly. Often times large corporations such as GM will tout that they are listening to customers when in fact, that is simply PR spin in itself. From what we have seen first-hand, GM seems to be seriously taking feedback from customers to heart. A prime example of feedback at work is the recent Buick Plug-In crossover. GM was ripped up one side and down the other about rebadging the Saturn Vue to form a....'Vuick.' Only four days after the announcement CEO Fritz Henderson himself axed the program due directly to consumer feedback.

GM is seeking out a barrage of mediums for customers to get their feedback to the company and the feedback appears to be going directly to the top brass of the organization, not PR folks or out-sourced customer service reps such as in the past. For a few years now GM has been leveraging their own blog site (www.gmblogs.com) as a source of electronic feedback from the consumer. That outlet has since been expanded to include “The Lab” which is essentially a blog for designers to 'test' future product design out on customers.

As said, here at GMI we have recent direct experience with GM Communications. In the old days it was almost total ignorance of the existence of GMI, and they did not approve of our member's freedom of speech and GMI management's unwillingness to limit those membership freedoms. But more recently GMI’s relationship with them has begun to change. Initially the change began when Bob Lutz asked GM Communications to assist us with this Editorial and we were contacted at a Director level with offers to help. While the assistance was not what we had hoped for, it was none-the-less welcome and we got some internal insights and some of our pictures from them. One of those insights concerned GM internal morale and we are told that as New GM has gone through several months of downsizing, it has been a tough work environment. Employees had been looking for something positive. So before they announced or began the "May The Best Car Win" campaign and the 60-Day Customer Satisfaction program, they shared the ads with employees. We are told the response was incredibly positive. Employees gave great feedback -- they were "happy to see [GM] fighting back" and "defending [it’s] products." It was apparently a huge morale boost at a time when GM desperately needed it.

At the same time as this contact was occurring GMI’s Editor-in-Chief Nick Saporito had contacted Chris Barger, the Director of Social Media at GM Communications and asked him if they would be willing to have more of a working relationship with GMI. Nick, who keeps well up on these things, realized that the new buzzword at GM Communications was that they needed to “humanize” GM and that a greater emphasis was on moving away from just traditional media and toward engaging customers more directly via the Internet.

Chris Barger had said that “When news breaks, the company should reach out directly to bloggers, commenters and twitterers to say, “okay, this is what you’ve seen, what questions can I answer for you? …Every news event becomes a Customer Relations Management event, and if you provide information in a candid and transparent way, it shows people that you’re trying to engage them as people or as customers”. As an example of the kind of direct engagement he was prescribing, Barger said that his staff had stayed on Twitter until midnight on the day that the auto bailout plan hit the press, engaging both journalists and citizens online. For instance, they got in touch directly with one twitterer who was hammering them relentlessly, even arranging for her to speak with GM executives on the phone. The result? For her, GM became a collection of people trying to solve a problem rather than a faceless corporate monolith, and she ended up writing a blog post about the bailout that was essentially neutral (a).

GMI’s Nick Saporito had hoped that GMI would be perfectly placed to help GM Communications achieve their more direct Internet contact as GMI has one of the largest on-line memberships of people interested in the goings on at GM. Unfortunately no response was at that time forthcoming from his approach to GM Communications and the offers of better relations from the Lutz initiated contact was seemingly not moving ahead very fast either. But sometimes good fortune steps in as when Nick Saporito happened to observe Chris Preuss (VP, GM Global Communications) hosting a live chat on GMReinvention where he was getting hammered with questions about why GM does not engage with enthusiast sites, some questions specifically mentioning GMInsidenews.

At that point Nick involved himself in the chat and supported Chris' response by saying that GM is "starting to work with us [at GMI]" and that we have noticed a "positive change" in GM Communications since the bankruptcy. However, that we "weren't quite there yet" in our relationship with GM. Chris Preuss posted it on the public chat and publicly responded that he would like to meet with Nick to see how GM and GMI could further work together. And while it took a few weeks, an email eventually arrived at GMI inviting a high-level meeting with key GMI and GM Communications management. We hope this may lead to initiatives that bring our members a better GMI experience in future.

In Australia this experience is already underway as Holden Communications has welcomed GMI with open arms. An example of this is GMI Australia Correspondent Mark Cadle being invited, along with the usual print journalists, to the weekend release and drive event surrounding Holden's new 3.6 and 3.0 SIDI technology. New GM at Holden are fully supportive of engaging the public via the on-line community.

Further to this new direct engagement with the public by GM, which we here at GMInsidenews are experiencing, we all know that Fritz Henderson has a "Tell Fritz" blog where consumers can interact directly with GM's CEO. And we are told that in the New GM the advertising, marketing and communications will be much more aggressive, hard-hitting, and will focus directly on product attributes. It has been pointed out that this is apparent in the just launched "May The Best Car Win" campaign, where Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and GMC products are compared directly to the top competitors. And GM claims there is a tone of confidence in these ads that you would not have seen in the Old GM coupled with the fact that the focus will be less on GM, and more on the products and brands. This is confirmed by the removal of the GM badge from vehicles, and from the ad campaign, which other than the initial Ed Whitacre ad, is to only feature products and brands in the future.

So perhaps one of the most encouraging signs of true change at GM has been the total attitude change from GM Communications people. At Old GM they were constantly making excuses for any question that challenged a move the corporation made. Additionally, they were not very open with customers or media and just had the fundamental attitude that they were there to clean up the corporate messes. Today the attitude of GM Communications employees is one of resilience. You do not find them making excuses for New GM’s actions, you find them explaining the logic of them and asking for feedback on said issue. Upon communicating with them you find that they are more open and seem to have a personal goal of seeing New GM succeed beyond what Old GM was ever capable of.

Those of us at GMI have seen testament to that attitude personally. Many of the communications people we work with are active on social media (namely Twitter) and they are tweeting the good words and changes at the New GM well beyond their work day. The positive sign in all of this lies in that these people are acting like real people; they are not reciting press releases with their names attached. Perhaps that was one of the fundamental flaws of Old GM’s communications skills – the employees attitudes were of poor mindset and low morale. Today we see many GM employees walking around with a spark in their eye about the New GM and how it is going to succeed. This type of fundamental shift in corporate culture is critical to the company and it appears that GM Communications is getting it accomplished.

So there certainly seems to be change in the air at GM Communications, and we hope it eventually blows a fresh wind through GM's public perception; although that will be a long and hard road requiring constant and open-minded effort.

Overall we cannot come to a final "grade" for Marketing/Communications. We're very encouraged by the signs of advancement within their marketing efforts, but 100 days is simply not enough to know for sure if GM marketing is going to truly evolve as much as it needs to. In regards to Communications, well, we'll grade them AFTER their efforts to collaborate with GMInsidenews are further known. The fact that they know GMI exists gives them good odds for a B or better though.
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(a) http://www.epolitics.com/2009/03/18/...tworked-world/

(1) "So Far, So Good for GM's 60-Day Guarantee." Edmunds. http://www.autoobserver.com/2009/09/...guarantee.html

(2) New GM's Commercials: "New GM" Marketing Watch

[mikmak]

Lol. That's it: hold them to ransom.

The change in attitude is pretty clear to see though. What once was Passive Aggressive bravado is now tangible confidence in much better product. But I suppose the former could not have really existed without the later.

[Bravada]

Passive Aggressive bravado

[appman85]

I just wanted to say I noticed that GM has really stepped up their marketing these last few months, and will pay dividends soon.

[Chaz_23]

Marketing the deal is not a bad idea in itself. But GM does it piecemeal. When Toyoduh markets a deal they still manage to market the brand and do it quite well. Even when Toyoduh markets a single model, it's always clear that it's a Tododuh.

I'm still not impressed with GM marketing. The ads are weak and not confident at all, despite the theme they don't sound it. Casting is usually aweful in GM ads both regular actors (exception- that football guy) and in particular voice actors. A lot needs to be improved. Compare with the confident Ford/Lincoln ads. Those are professional, sleek, and well-directed, no-nonsense ads. GM's ads look amateurish, embarassing, and cringe-inducing by comparison.

GM marketing needs to excell in quality, it needs to be consistent, and brand-oriented. Like De Lorenzo said it last week's column, ads need to tell a story, evoke dreams, and have personality.

[vcs2600]

Good article, but its really impossible to say yet how well any of this marketing is working. The article says Buick has a "sharp brand focus", but they've already been through two different campaigns for the LaCrosse and now they're doing the Best Car Win stuff. Let's see if they get results first.

As for GM having a closer working relationship with GMI, congratulations, that's great.

However, please keep in mind that GMI's best features are the unique reporting on the unannounced decisions and products. By the time GM is ready to announce something, it's usually "old news" to GMI readers Hopefully none of that will be sacrificed to comply with the traditional press release mumbo-jumbo.

[SCCA1995]

Interesting read, Nick. It's good to hear that GM is no longer ignoring the voice of the consumer.

Originally Posted by Nsap

Another downfall we have noticed in the last 100 days regarding marketing efforts is the lack of commercials for the 2010 Equinox and Terrain that did not fall in the May The Best Car Win campaign. To our knowledge there has been one Equinox commercial unrelated to the campaign, however none for the Terrain. These are two of the best GM products ever, they need to be touted. We would like to see Terrain ads sporting GMC's "Professional Grade" marketing; touting the Terrain's long list of standard features (Bluetooth, XM, rear-view camera, USB port, etc.). As for the Equinox, let's see some ads comparing it to the competition, since it excels in just about every regard.

Funny that this was posted. I was passing a magazine rack & decided to stop & read without buying. As I browsed through the latest Motor Trend, I noticed a 2-page advertisement for the Terrain. White background, black Terrain. It pointed out a few items on the truck, including the stadard rear view camera. While I personally am not in the market for that vehicle or any in it's class, I must say it was refreshingly simple. A back to basics approach is a good start for the advertising. As time goes by, they will have to go with something a bit more than that.

[1957wildcat]

Originally Posted by nsap

. . . Buick . . . the brand's apparent new tag line: "The New Class of World Class." . . . Although we're not quite sold on their new tag line...shouldn't Cadillac be GM's "world class" brand?

I think GM is going from the position that all of their four brands... Chevrolet, GMC, Buick, and Cadillac... are world-class vehicles.

[mikmak]

Originally Posted by Bravada

eg. We have the best cars because they are our cars! You love them too because you are GM fans! LOVE IT!

or

Pontiac builds the best cars in the world!