Even competitors’ insights can reinvent a stale brand
Being prepared for all circumstances is what ensures certain victory. — Sun Tzu
The real lesson of war is about teamwork. In most companies, senior executives lack what the military calls unit cohesion. With strong unit cohesion, an outfit has a high degree of battle readiness. Without it, even the best-equipped outfit is unprepared for combat.
An advantage comes from having fresh intelligence and using it wisely. Buick is a good example of a brand that managed to use fresh intelligence to wage war as a defender. Though General Motors Corporation was among the world’s largest automakers by vehicle unit sales, the Buick brand had been in solid decline for many years, and was widely perceived as a car brand for older men. Not exactly a sexy message.
Buick watched, tracked, planned, and prepared. Their intelligence revealed an untapped, underserved market of young women. Seeing the potential to revitalize a brand that had gone totally stale, they launched Verano, a car aimed straight at that demographic, with ads featuring younger women driving a kind of compact, fuel-efficient vehicle Buick had not traditionally been known for.
Tracking and analyzing their data led them to see that social media campaigns seem to be moving the needle, so they were able to invest more extensively in this less-expensive platform and reap great rewards of customer awareness in their target demographic. Interestingly nearly 30% of Verano buyers are not previous GM buyers. They were able to steal buyers from their competitors, thanks to the focused effort they were able to put forth via their use of intelligence. Other automobile manufactures are now waking up.
Traditionally, automotive marketing has concentrated on power and performance—commercials showing cars taking turns at high speeds or the sounds of revving engines. Companies are now learning that those sales pitches don’t appeal to most women. I recently saw an advertisement for Lincoln Motor Company which clearly demonstrates how Lincoln is using GM competitive intelligence to capture leftover share and possibly reinvent themselves.
It asks: “Does the world need another luxury vehicle? Not really. We asked ourselves, ‘Why build one?’ We look to the past, thought about what worked, and drew inspiration for the future. We remembered how Edsel Ford never set out to build a luxury car. He simply built the car he wanted to drive. No rules, just vision. One of not being all things to all people, but rather everything to a certain few…. Crafting automobiles with humanity and attention to the most important detail of all, the driver. It’s how we started. It’s how we became great again. Call it luxury, call it engineered humanity. We call it the Lincoln Motor Vehicle: a reinvented wheel with you at its center. We’re not designing a luxury vehicle for the world. We’re designing it for you.”
What the Lincoln Motor Company is doing here is very much in line with what Buick has done. They have used the intelligence at their fingertips to reinvent themselves by going after a completely new market. Both GM and Lincoln Motors had to shift thinking internally and reposition themselves from being an “old man,” stale brand of traditional luxury, to becoming modernized and progressive. Automakers are beginning to understand how women operate in today’s world and depicting them appropriately, which is only sensible given that women influence about 85% of all purchases. Their ability to identify wide-space opportunities, based on proprietary understanding of latent and emerging demand, was the key to their success.
Excerpted from Wake Up or Die (Published by Advantage Media Group) by Corrine Sandler, CEO of Fresh Intelligence Research Corp. in Toronto.
This excerpt appears in the Nov. 11 issue of Marketing.
