Oldsmobile Case Study - Brand Failure
Oldsmobile Case Study - Brand Failure
the automotive press, and an intensive marketing drive that included strategic appearances in The X-Files, they failed to capture the share of the younger market they were designed to attract. At the end of 2000, GM made what must have been a painful, if unavoidable decision to gradually phase out the Oldsmobile brand. The Oldsmobile collectors models mark the end of production. From 2004, no future Oldsmobile models will be manufactured. Since the decision was made, marketing experts have been conducting post-mortems of the brand to see what exactly went wrong. One mistake that has been highlighted repeatedly is GMs attempt to strip the brand of its old fashioned connotations. This was always going to be difficult for a car that predates Ford and even has the word old within its name. GM tried to get round this problem by launching an advertising campaign based around the slogan, This is not your fathers Oldsmobile. However, as Coca-Cola discovered with New Coke, it is not easy to reverse a brand identity which has been a century in the making. Another, rather pointless tactic was to build Oldsmobiles without the name Oldsmobile on the outside of the car. One Brand Week article, published in February 2001 after GM made its decision public, examines the folly of such branding exercises: The problem [Oldsmobile] encountered is that brands, particularly brands with a well-established image, cannot be repositioned. At best they may be nudged slowly in a new direction but not one that is the antithesis of what it stood for [. . .] A better solution, and a more unique approach, would have been to accept the brand as it was, with its older profile, and give its older customers a product they wanted to own with a message that appealed to their needs. In addition to capitalizing on the existing profile of the brand, that strategy would have taken advantage of the growing number of mature Americans and their increased spending power. The Oldsmobile hadnt always been viewed as staid and boring though. Although it had never been a youth brand, it had been considered an innovator in its field. The most critical brand damage therefore occurred when this reputation faded, and the motivation to buy an Oldsmobile (as opposed to another GM car) no longer remained so great. However, despite these obvious failings, affection among Oldsmobiles traditional customers is still strong. There is even a Web site (www.saveoldsmobile.org) dedicated to encouraging GM to reverseits decision to phase the brand out. But a visit to the Web site will only serve to remind you that the significance of the Oldsmobile brand is confined to the past. The affection most feel for the car is already tinged with nostalgia. Indeed, if it is the job of branding to distinguish one product from the next in the mind of the customer, the Oldsmobile brand failed decades ago.
Make your brand distinctive. When GM decided to adopt a policy of uniformity, the Oldsmobile brand became too, well, general. Dont betray your brand values. One can change some of the elements providing that the consumer continues to recognize that the same brand values are still present after the change, says Jacques Cherron of brand consultancy JRC&A. Attempting to convert Oldsmobile into a young and hip brand was clearly one brand betrayal too far.