Category Archives: marketing

Why Cadillac will soon be back on top

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"We are in a long-term campaign to close our credibility gap.  The reality of our hardware and the general misperception of the overall buying public still exist.  The V-Series is shouting that we have performance and to take a look.  We want to bring the general public up to speed on what’s happening at Cadillac.  Part of that is getting the right kind of drivers into our products who will spread the news by word of mouth.  If we give them a piece of hardware that is satisfying to drive, we’ve got them in our boat and have made them all advocates."
— Jim Taylor, General Manager, Cadillac

How do you build a brand?  The people at Cadillac are rebuilding their brand piece by piece, and they’re doing it right:

  • Creating great individual products
  • Creating a product family where each member contributes to the bigger brand in a unique but complimentary way — for the first time in years, Cadillac is selling cars that aren’t a Chevy underneath. 
  • Pricing products so that they’re a good value, but not so low that they smell of desperation.  Nobody likes being seen in a devalued product — that’s what happened to the Ford Taurus
  • Racing the cars to gain credibility with gearhead mavens who dictate automotive goodness, which is how BMW grew to be the Ultimate Driving Machine from a nothing brand in the 60’s (it worked for Subaru, too)

It’s not about creating an expensive advertising campaign, holding your breath, and hoping the suckers don’t notice that their purchase doesn’t live up to your promises.  Build it right, get the mavens to come, and then everyone else will come.

PS:  If you’re asking "Why so many cars on this blog?", here’s my answer.

Good marketing takes guts

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Good marketing takes guts.  Sure, analytics are important and you need to have them if you want to avoid blowing both halves of your promotional budget on negative NPV efforts.  But analytics aren’t sufficient.  Good marketing means taking unquantifiable risks once in a while.  Really, what do you have to lose?

That’s why I was thrilled last week to see that Footnote No. 2 on the iPod Shuffle product page said "Do not eat iPod Shuffle".  Even with the lowliest footnote, here was Apple being Apple, thinking different, not afraid to poke fun at uptight lawyers and all the CYA footnoting typical of consumer product marketing.  This was about being fractal, being willing to be as hip and daring in something as trivial as a footnote as Apple is with big things like messaging, industrial design, and channel strategy.  Somewhere in Cupertino sat a brilliant, grinning brand manager, and I wanted to hire them on the spot. 

So imagine my dismay today when I went back to the Apple site to write a post about that brilliant brand manager and found that their cheeky disclaimer has been replaced by this piece of paralegal drivel:

Music capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128Kbps AAC encoding

Perhaps the other thing was just a joke.  Or perhaps some gutsy brand manager or web developer got their wee wee hit by the hard hammer of the CMO.  In the end, boring won out over brilliant.

Bummer.  Good marketing takes guts.

Feb 4 update:  I ate iPod Shuffle

Good brands are fractal

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Definition of fractal, from Hyperdictionary: 

A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be
subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a
smaller copy of the whole. Fractals are generally self-similar (bits
look like the whole) and independent of scale (they look similar, no
matter how close you zoom in)

Good brands are fractal.  Every interaction you have reflects the interaction you’ll have with every other piece of the whole, as well as the whole itself.  Since "brand" is shorthand for the total experience you get from buying, using, servicing, and disposing of a product, creating a great brand requires taking a fractal point of view to the process of designing total experiences where everything — large and small — is consistent and mutually self-reinforcing.

What’s the implication for creating cool stuff?  I haven’t fully thought this one out, but I think it all boils down to leadership.  Behind every great product is someone who had a vision of the end thing in mind and was able to say "yes" and "no" to help the development team understand that vision.  In a way, great products require a kind of fractal leadership able to recognize the right texture for a button, the right message for the box, the right approach to customer support and service.

What do you think?

Promoting for the long haul

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A few weeks ago I bemoaned the lack of attention paid to the temporal aspects of designed objects.  The same criticism can be applied to the world of brand promotional activities.

Promotions are one way in which we can shape the reflective aspects of a design.  We typically think about promotional campaigns as only impacting relatively brief spans of time — say an hour (Super Bowl commercial), a day, a week, a month, or even a year.  But what would happen if you challenged your marketing crew to come up with promotional strategies that span decades, even generations?  I bet you’d be dished up some innovative campaigns — and I’d wager many of those would yield a positive net present value (or positive ROI).  By investing for the ages, you simply have to shoot to create something intrinsically valuable.

Take BMW’s Art Car  Collection, for example.  Starting in 1975 with Alexander Calder’s painting of a tasty BMW 3.0 CSL Le Mans racer, the Art Car Collection has continued more or less uninterrupted up through the present day.  Some of the resulting artwork is simply stunning, some is less so, but all of it serves to underscore several key elements of the BMW brand: audaciousness, sensitivity to form, and a belief that each car is a unique and valuable work of kinetic, industrial art.  Instead of dropping thousands of dollars on a few TV commercials, BMW instead chose to create something of intrinsic worth.  The payoff for BMW is that it can now add spice to any public event simply by rolling out a few of the Art Cars, so weighty is their physical charisma. 

A very special moment for me indeed was being able to sneak up and caress the rear fender of Calder’s car as it sat, unattended, at the Monterey Historic Races a few years ago.  As a young boy I saw a photo of driver Sam Posey sawing away at the wheel.  Seeing it in the flesh was like touching the very soul of BMW.

Isn’t that a better investment in the brand than a few TV commercials?

On Passion, Brands, & Bob Lutz

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Where do brands come from?  Robert Lutz gets it — over at FastLane he’s explained what the Chevrolet brand means to him.  Notice that he’s not using abstract language to talk about brand; instead, he talks about actual cars and their qualities, because it’s product that creates brand meaning and value, not the other way around.  For Lutz, brand is also about passion:

… I do love the passion with which the Camaro faithful express their
undying commitment to the object of their affections… At the end of the day, that’s
what our business is all about – inspiring passion among the faithful.
That’s what has allowed me to spend my life’s work in an industry I’m
passionate about. We should all be so lucky.

Creating and sustaining a brand that people really want to make a part of their lives is about connecting functionality and emotion and meaning.  Your products and the services you build around them are what bring it all to life.  Passionate people are the means to that end.

A Brand in a Starter Button

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All of a sudden, Aston Martin is the "It" brand of the automotive world.  To be sure, the Aston Martin of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s had a certain cachet, but it was a cigar-smoke-and-over-stuffed-leather-chairs-British-men’s-club kind of cachet.  No more.  Now Aston Martin is sexier than Ferrari, sportier than Porsche, manlier than Lamborghini.  The new DB9 is the first modern GT car design of the 21st century. 

This is a true brand renaissance, brought about not by the machinations of a branding firm or an advertising agency, but via  a product development team that reached back to the golden days of Roy Salvadori and James Bond, distilled the essence of Aston Martin into something actionable, and then went to work. 

Easy for me to say, but what does it mean, and how did they do it?  They did it by taking something as familiar as the process of starting the motor and asking "What could be uniquely Aston Martin about this experience?"  Here’s what Aston Martin designer Sarah Maynard says about the start button on the new DB9:

It
seemed wrong to us that most car starter buttons – the first point of
contact between driver and engine – is a plastic button. We wanted
something better so decided on crystal-like glass. The Aston Martin
logo is sand etched into it. It’s lit red when the ignition is on, and
afterwards changes to light blue. I think it’s a really cool piece of
design.

Glass.  Etching.  Not the usual way of doing business.  More expensive than plastic.  But special, and evocative of the way British cars used to be.  And incredibly good for the Aston Martin brand, and perhaps even a good reason to spend so much on a car.  This is great example of decisions made using not the data of a cost accountant, but with the judgment and deep experience of a trained designer who lives and feels and loves brand.

Fortune on Blogging for Dollars

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Fellow bloggers, members of the blog-reading community, and Web Dudes (you know who you are), I have to admit that my last few posts have been merely annotated links to third-party content rather than the stimulating, original material you’ve come to expect as a discerning reader of metacool.  Why?  I’ve had a helluva cold so far in 2005 and I’m not feeling too generative.

So, here’s another annotated link:  Fortune recently published an insightful article on the state of business blogging.  It briefly mentions The Official QuickBooks Online Edition blog I started at Intuit (I wrote the majority of the content on the QuickBooks Online blog before October 2004 — my name got overwritten when I left the company due to a bug in the TypePad software). 

Blogs are fast becoming a critical part of the marketing mix, so it’s worth your while to give the article a read.

Cool Books of 2004

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Another list.  Here are my favorite reads of 2004. No claims to comprehensiveness or consistency, and not all were published in the past year; just a list of books that made me think different in 2004:

On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins:  an elegant book on the nature of intelligence and how the brain works.  The good news for metacool readers is that "real intelligence" is the way that designers think.

The System of the World, by Neil Stephenson: third in the baroque triology, capable of stimulating latent nerdism, and a helluva of a long book, it continues Stephenson’s fascinating journey through the origins of modern finance and computing.  I loved every page of it.  Not for everyone, which is refreshing.

The Innovator’s Solution, by Clayton Christensen: forget the hype, the content is outstanding.  Clay tested the ideas in this book on my class at Harvard Business School, and yet I still find something fresh and interesting each time I go back to its pages.  The chapters on need-based market segmentation strategies are excellent.

Porsche: Excellence was Expected, by Karl Ludvigsen:  perhaps the best business book of 2004, unfortunately Excellence is marketed as a car book, which will keep it out of the mainstream.  In a world where marketing-led "brand building" is an oxymoron, Ludvigsen shows how Porsche built a brand with deep integrity piece by piece, slowly evolving it over time.  His discussion of the genesis of the Porsche Cayenne SUV also shows how quickly a brand can be diluted and maimed by managers out to make a quick buck.

Orbiting the Giant Hairball, by Gordon MacKenzie:  any book recommended by both Richard Tait and Bob Sutton (both proponents of humane business practices, and really good guys themselves) has to be good, and Hairball delivers.  Look, any organization will have its problems, and those problems can seem particularly nasty when seen from the inside.  The real question is: do you care enough about those problems do something about them?  Hairball is a guide to engaging with an organization to help solve its problems without losing your soul.  It also contains some great advice about dealing with nasty behaviors in the workplace, including teasing, which has run rampant in every org I’ve ever worked in.

Emotional Design, by Donald Norman:  if you haven’t noticed, I’m
quite taken by this wonderful piece of thinking.  His
Visceral-Behavioral-Reflective model of human cognition is a powerful
way to understand slippery concepts like brand and meaning, making this
one of the most important books on marketing (where marketing is the process of understanding human needs and creating offerings to meet those needs) to come out in years.  His
message about beautiful things working better is important, too.  Read
this one.