Opinion... 'Motor City' needs to find its brand soul - fast

This distinction relates to the city being the location of the three largest American car makers, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. More recently, over the past 30 years, this American industry has been in a slow, steady decline, reaching today’s crisis state.

Top executives from Detroit are in America’s capital appealing to lawmakers to give them money for a bailout. It’s a difficult decision to have consumers - taxpayers - donate money to an industry that has largely ignored their interests for decades. “Forgive me for screwing you for the past 40 years - we’ll try to look into changing our attitude in the future. Oh, and sorry about the planned obsolescence.”

America can’t afford for these industrial behemoths to fail, but also can’t trust them to change. America introduced the automobile to the masses, and, as a result, also the brands that captured the popular imagination for almost 100 years. Brands such as Cadillac, Lincoln, Plymouth, Chevrolet, and models like the Corvette, Mustang and Barracuda.

These brands thrived because they embraced the American-ness of their origin - the open road, freedom, possibility and power. Even if you never owned one, you could still name them, and dream the dream. Even in Japan, all cars today still have Anglicised model names.

The industry became global. But Detroit kept making products designed for its America. Making the problem worse, the designs were stuck in slow motion - the companies were like athletes chasing a ball, not going to where the ball was headed, but to where the ball had been.

Detroit’s reaction abroad to challenges like fuel crises, relevance in foreign markets, and value for money issues was to create smaller, ugly cars. But, as Toyota has demonstrated so clearly with its current Prius model, if you are going to make a small, ugly car sell, it has to have an emotional brand promise that people will embrace.

The ugly duckling Prius has a brand soul that people relate to and even pay a premium for - a car that makes a statement about the brand owner as a caring, concerned citizen of the earth.

Detroit argues that anything short of a bailout will result in the extinction of the US auto industry. That even a managed bankruptcy will make consumers lose faith in their brands, re-evaluate and refuse to consider them when shopping for cars. Now, a re-evaluation is exactly what Detroit needs. But not a re-evaluation based on a new paint job, name change, or big, breakthrough ad campaign - a re-evaluation based on a total re-invention.

Detroit needs to find its brand soul. The potential for American car brands with buyers may be dormant now, but the potential is as huge as a 1971 Buick Electra. If you look at the heritage of American car brands, these are values that are still uniquely American and desirable around the world. Add another American value that could credibly be appropriated - innovation (think Microsoft and Apple). Now you have an enhanced, emotive brand proposition to build on.

Fuel-efficient, technologically innovative American products that also embrace great design inside and out can once again allow Detroit to compete with the Toyotas and Hyundais and Audis of the world. It’s time for Motor City to embrace the spirit of American innovation and reveal an automotive soul that can renovate the industry and its brands. Coincidentally, Detroit is also the home of Motown - soul music.


Craig Briggs, Brandimage Asia-Pacific
[email protected]