Putting a face to GM products

Stuart Elliott of the New York Times always has something interesting to say. In today's column in the times, he takes on GM's marketing in the context of the tyranny of too much. GM is a company that isn't shy about spending marketing dollars; as one of the country's largest advertisers, it spends $3 billion (yes that's billion with a B) on advertising each year. To put that in perspective, Blackfriars estimates that GM's annual marketing spending is about 1% of the $930.1 billion to be spent on marketing in 2005.

So what's the problem? Some of the executives Mr. Elliott interviewed zeroed in on the GM's marketing challenges in very pointed terms.

"In a society looking more for a set of values on wheels to bond with, G.M. seems to be falling back on offering commodity brands" sold on deals and rebates, said Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, a consulting company in New York specializing in brand and customer loyalty.

"Other brands give you a sense of what they are: Mercedes-Benz stands for living well; BMW stands for living fast; Volvo stands for safety," he added. "When we ask people about G.M. brands, we get very neutral assessments; they don't stand for anything."

Jonah Disend, president of Redscout, a brand strategy consultant in New York, agreed. "G.M. has gone from the great branding company to the great 'blanding' company," he said, in large part because "it can't possibly focus on all the brands it has."

One advertising executive actually had a refreshing take on how GM could fix this as well. His suggestion: return to the heritage of Alfred P. Sloan, who first invented the concept of marketing brands to specific types of people.

Bob Wyatt, partner and executive creative director at Union, an advertising agency in New York, said that General Motors should heed its own "heritage of branding" and recreate the model that worked so well in its early decades, of making each divisional brand stand for a different step on a hierarchy of desire.

"They should have consumers move up the ladder in the different stages of their lives as they used to, from Chevrolet all the way to Cadillac," Mr. Wyatt said. That could be accomplished by "simplifying the lineups of each division so each brand stands for something specific," he added, rather than the overly broad current approach of having, for instance, Chevrolets that run from cheap (Aveo) to expensive (Corvette).

In short, each brand has to stand for values that mean a lot to very specific people. The problem standing in GM's way isn't money -- it's the corporate will to make it happen. Sadly, in a company the size of GM, few executives are likely to take the risks necessary to make that happen.

But there are some great techniques that can help. We here at Blackfriars are big fans of a technique pioneered by Alan Cooper called scenario design. This software design technique uses personas as concrete proxies for entire classes of customers, and requires that companies think through the experiences of these personas in advance of building the product. And perhaps Alan could help GM; after all, the title of the book where he introduced the idea is The Inmates Are Running The Asylum.