Long before the CEOs of the Big Three hopped aboard their private jets, they presided over the biggest marketing failure in American history.
Many miles ago, long before Detroit started losing billions a month, it lost something even more important: its roadmap to the American unconscious.
So while we've heard all the arguments for the impending demise, it's high time we took Detroit's slow-motion suicide for what it is: a marketing failure, probably the biggest one in history. It takes years of monumental incompetence to squander the biggest, deepest love affair the American consumer has ever had.
I wasn't surprised when Detroit's million-dollar men cranked up their corporate jets on Friday, popping warm nuts while strategizing about how to land some cold cash.
That 360-horsepower blunder--which may very well have sealed the fate of the Big Three--capped off decades of marketing incompetence.
Car companies have so many levels of creative approval that even a crash dummy would have trouble surviving the process.
The image destruction started when their brands began to exhibit the worst kind of corporatist behavior, summoning up dark memories of the tobacco industry. They battled against every safety initiative, starting with mandatory seat belts. They tried to beat back higher CAFE standards. They lobbied against electric cars and alternative fuel.
As consumers were increasingly making purchase decisions based on the practices of the company behind the product, the domestic auto industry became a loathsome choice.
Detroit's bad actions hurt it with a huge part of the market--the more than 30 million people in Richard Florida's "Creative Class" who work with ideas, live in urban areas, and are more progressive. Even the more traditional consumers who stuck with American cars felt abandoned.
The jerks running the companies didn't help. Your CEO is a marketing statement, and in an era of visionary leaders celebrated by the media--other than Lee Iacocca, who retired in 1979--the guys running the show were overcompensated, colorless zeroes.
From 1974 through 2000, GM was piloted by Tom Murphy, Roger Smith, Bob Stempel, and John Smith, failures whose names are recalled only as poster guys for deck-chair rearrangement.
As these weak-kneed leaders came under pressure for their practices and products, they turned psychologically inward. It all culminated with Michael Moore's Roger and Me in 1989, a national display of corporate paranoia. An industry whose birthright was independence came to represent villainous bureaucracy.
And in a colossal marketing mistake that scraped away any chance for individuality, Detroit's legions of PR firms continued to let its brands be bundled as the Big Three. Can you imagine Apple permitting itself to be bundled with Dell and HP this way?
Ironically, though, as its reputation plummeted, Detroit's cars actually improved. The Detroit Free Press notes that Consumer Reports recently found that "Ford's reliability is now on par with good Japanese automakers." And J.D. Power ranked Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Ford, GMC, Mercury, Pontiac, and Lincoln brands' overall quality as high or higher than that of Acura, Audi, BMW, Honda, Nissan, and Volvo.
This is an epic advertising failure, attributable to Detroit's stubbornness and arrogance. The Big Three kept working with a small group of the biggest and most boring ad agencies, refusing, until recently, to work with anyone who didn't have car experience. Leo Burnett has worked with GM since the 1930s; J. Walter Thompson has worked with Ford for more than 60 years.
I've worked in advertising for a while--thankfully, never on a car account. And I will tell you that it's well-known in the industry that working with Detroit is torture. The Big Three's demand for mediocrity is legendary. They have formulaic rules--the "running shot" of the car has to be a certain length in every commercial--and they have so many levels of creative approval that even a crash dummy would have trouble surviving the process intact.
That's why, even though GM, Ford, and Chrysler spend more than $6 billion a year in advertising, it's tough to conjure up a single memorable spot. Their uninspiring advertising speaks to an America that barely exists anymore. We're more diverse, more urban, more media savvy. We appreciate irony and obliqueness, we demand that our sensibilities be respected and indulged. Detroit insults us.
Take this 2008 commercial for the Dodge Grand Caravan. (The way Detroit names its cars--with all the originality of meeting rooms at a Westin--is another story.) Here, some reluctant participants at a family reunion are transformed in a beatific bunch by a ride in the Caravan. (Not exactly the imagination worthy of a bailout.)
Detroit should have sought the best talent in the world. It needed to open up to smaller, independent agencies that are the idea factories for the industry. And it should have commissioned film directors, not car hacks, to direct its spots. It happens in Europe all the time. Turn Judd Apatow, Spike Lee, Spike Jonze, and Michael Gondry loose and see what happens.
I've also believed that smart marketing could have turned Detroit's union hurt into an emotional benefit. It's absolutely amazing to me that for decades, Detroit took the heat for paying decent wages and providing health care and pensions. Hey, isn't that what big companies are supposed to do? Hasn't Wal-Mart been pilloried for precisely the opposite?
Imagine if Detroit had created compelling advertising that showed its workers living the American dream, and had gotten the UAW to pitch in? The sweet stroke of marketing would have made everyone who drives a domestic car feel virtuous, ennobled. Think how much credit Starbucks gets for paying its coffee growers a few measly cents extra.
Finally, Detroit's marketing failure extends all the way to your neighborhood: the dealership network. The retail industry knows that to survive, it needs to amp up the experience and add entertainment. But car dealerships look like post-apocalyptic empty shells that survived a neutron bomb.
Why didn't Detroit push its fat and rich dealers to leverage the power of architecture and hire Frank Gehry to create a new paradigm? Think about the branding statement that would be.
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.
Seems like a basic marketing equation to me: If you're not going to be there for your customer, your customers won't be there for you.
Adam Hanft is a decoder of the consumer culture and our branded planet. He blogs for The Huffington Post and FastCompany.com, and has been published extensively, including in The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Civilization, Radar, and the back-page column for Inc. He has appeared on CNN, the Today show, and many other media outlets. He is also the co-author of Dictionary of the Future. Adam also decodes the culture as founder and CEO of the marketing and branding firm Hanft Raboy.
This piece appeared in the Daily Beast on November 24th, 2008.
Knock, knock, knock! You there?
Yeah, it's us, the American Consumer. Oh, and Taxpayer. And Bailer-Outer.
LIsten, big D, we'd LOVE to buy your products regardless of marketing and advertising, but we can't afford for them to be broken and in the shop so often, you're not offering us what we need and want anyhow, and beside that, you aren't showing us you intend to change.
Hey!
Yoo-hoo!
Motor City!
Hello, the house!
Lights are on, but is anybody home?
Nah, heard they flew away on the corporate jet to some fancy resort to congratulate themselves on their business skills.
Now, which way is that Honda dealership?
I think you're overlooking some real problems in Detroit. You're an ad-man trying to sell advertising, but there is no media blitz which can change the underlying obsolescence of the oil-burning power plant, or the status quo automotive paradigm jointly enforced by the "Big 3" and the oil industry. US auto makers should have led the way into the 21st Century with new designs and alternative fuel options, but the corporatist tendency to make all decisions based on the largest return in the short term demanded they stay the course while the profits continued. They refused to adapt to easily predictable market demands. They had their run, now they're done.
It is not the function of businesses in a market economy to convince their customers to be ecologically responsible. If they tried, they'd die trying (while Toyota and Honda took over their lucrative truck business). If ever there was an argument for government leadership through regulation, it was this. Without agressive government regulations, using CAFE or whatever, to make sure ALL manufacturers have to mover toward greater fuel efficiency, the industry simply won't go there. Believe me, Detroit isn't hurting because of the Prius.
In the early 70's, my frugal, American-products buying, patriotic parents splurged and bought the family a new car--a top of the line Chevrolet station wagon. Within two weeks, both front doors fell off. Literally. Dropped into a store parking lot . That was only the beginning. The car went through one major part failure after another (8 fan belt pulley arms) and countless days and weeks in the shop, before they finally got rid of it. It was over 30 years before they again bought an American-made vehicle.
Flash to the early 90's. My husband and I finally bought ----and with some trepidation after my parents horrible station wagon experience---our first new American-made car---a Dodge Grand Caravan. It turned out to beThe Minivan From Hell. Every major part on the car failed except the steering column. It was on its fourth transmission when we finally got rid of it.
Now we're solid Hondites andToyotaphiles, and, so are our kids. None of us have the money , the time, or the energy to fool with American made pieces of c--p masquerading as legitimate motor vehicles.
A business that makes bad products and has a bad attitude toward its customers doesn't deserve to continue---much less to get bailed out by the very taxpaying consumers it has routinely ripped off for decades.
Detroit's automakers aren't in the business to make vehicles -- they're in the business to make MONEY. That's why they turned so much of their attention to the mortgage markets and creating financial subsidiaries like GM's Ditech and whatever Ford & Chrysler's units were called -- which went belly-up when the meltdown started back in 2007.
In addition, the automakers have for decades said that universal government-administered healthcare was a VERY BAD thing b/c it robbed them of the opportunity to offer employer-paid healthcare (and pensions) as an incentive to hire job seekers -- only to whine and cry about actually having to PAY for the promises services!!!!
If Detroit was serious about manufacturing vehciles here in the US, they would have never killed the electric vehicles they were producing back in the 1990s. They just got greedy, like their counterparts in Big Biz, and decided to junk their US workforce b/c it cost too much to sustain it -- which goes back to my original point: the healthcare/pension "burden" which automakers claim they cannot maintain, is due to their own insistence that they be "burdened" with it in the first place!!!!
How ridiculous!
The big 3's problems weren't caused by bad marketing. Their problem was they made bad cars. Period.
Detroit's problem is neither technology nor marketing. It's a whole lot of things, from legacy costs to inefficient business models, to lousy investments - non of which will be so easily fixed as bad marketing. But given how many American livelihoods depend on Detroit, do we have any choice but to try to resussitate them?
The solution now: A merged GM/Chrylser should partner with a Honda, Hyundai or somesuch, a national healthplan should supplant the new company's exposure there, and a tax-friendly electric car policy should quickly turn the Volt to the Model T of many new Detroit altfuel offerings. The Ford-Mazda combine has had its bumps but on par has helped both companies, its workers and customers. Sure, give 'em the bailout but with an industry-wide plan for future sustainability.
When it was time for my first car to go off to college, I chose the Japanese auto maker. Cheaper cars, fuel effecient. Hands down, it was what I needed. A car that was reliable and cheaper to operate.
Why go American now?
Detroit will get their bailout. Then what? They will still roll those gas guzzling Hummers out anyway.
Better idea? Let the oil companies bail them out.
Of course it doesn't. So what you're actually saying is you'll buy a car that gets about the same mileage as an American car, is built roughly the same, except replacement parts are typically more expensive.
Americans buy foreign because they can't afford to tie up thousands of dollars in a vehicle that may or may not start in the morning, that may or may not shift into gear, that may or may not have working electric door locks and a working air conditioner in 100 degree heat, jeg.
If someone gave me a brand new Dodge minivan today, I'd sell it for half Kelly Blue Book price if I had to, and put that money into a used Toyota.
they did have superior product...
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