GM: Branding Opportunity

GM Faces This Century's Greatest Branding Opportunity

The news almost defies comprehension: As of Monday, GM has recalled 29 million vehicles this year, which is three times the total it sold worldwide in 2013, and larger than all recalls in the U.S. that year. It has set aside an additional $500 million to cover costs this quarter, and direct expenses could total in the billions. Its new CEO has been grilled by Congress and, according to most PR and marketing experts, its brand and corporate reputation are in crisis.

I say GM faces the greatest branding opportunity we’ve seen this century.

Just think about how hard companies have to work these days just to get peoples’ attention. Entire budgets and departments are dedicated to generating every conceivable way to rise about the media clutter, and get folks to watch or listen to something. Much of that content is silly or otherwise intended to shock or amaze. In fact, some of GM’s competitors have raised its creation to an art form.

Yet pivoting from gaining that attention, and translating it into things that matter — like dealership visits, or setting the right context for a conversation with dollar signs attached to it — is harder, more costly, and less reliable than it ever was using old fashioned marketing strategy and media tools.

And now, 29 million car owners have been told that they must visit a GM showroom. Granted, it’s not a happy prompt, but it’s not stupid viral content, either. It’s real, actionable, and sets the stage for a variety of activities GM and its dealer network could deliver.

What if the company looked at it as an opportunity to exploit, instead of a crisis to manage?

It could set some big, hairy brand goal, like making every recall visit result in a satisfied, repeat customer. Delivering on it would take wildly smart, thoughtful strategy on what that interaction would look like, of course. It would probably include an offer, if not many, on fixing other things (cars built in 1999 are going to need it). Maybe it could use an offer to upgrade, or trade in, or simply share ways for customers to participate in an ongoing public conversation about their experiences and expectations.

The recall wouldn’t be a discrete event, but rather a step in an ongoing conversation that was authentic, meaningful and valuable , taking the company and its stakeholders into deeper connections and relationships of true co-creation. It could give birth to entirely new models of marketing platforms and definitions of lifetime customer value.

The crucial component of such an approach would be its dealers, who’d need to be equipped and then empowered to literally redefine GM’s brand 29 million separate times. It would be a crash course in the future of branding, both for them and the marketers back at headquarters, who’d need to give up presumptions of control once and for all.

But there’s no reason why GM couldn’t do it. No other brand, let alone another car company, has been handed the gift of the government all but compelling customers (going back 15 years) to reconnect with it.

And the math behind the recall doesn’t substantiate an insurmountable indictment of the company. The ratio of deaths attributed to its vehicles is far lower than the incidents/vehicles for the industry overall; in fact, they’re more in the direction of the likelihood of getting hit by lightning. That’s not to minimize even a single death, but it does suggest that the recall could be understood less as evidence of a past lapse in safety, and more as the future assertion of it. There’s stuff communicators could work with here.

Therefore, the other crucial component to this strategy would be the company fixing its operational issues — not just to its satisfaction, or those of its regulators — but demonstrating it has initiated truly novel and wide-ranging changes. GM can’t just technically improve; it must dramatically evolve.

Imagine if it began developing what could be next generation processes and rules for quality and reliability across the enterprise, from design and sourcing, to manufacturing and service. It could announce cutting-edge engagements with third parties to not just improve testing, but revolutionize it. Ditto for its handling of data, not to mention its reporting insights (internally) and compliance efforts (externally), or its employment policies.

Such tangible strengthening of its operations would be what its stakeholders needed to once again value and trust GM’s corporate reputation. It would also be the functional basis upon which it built those 29 million new/better brand relationships.

It’s easy to see brands and reputations through the lens of creative marketing content, news and social media chatter, and the fluctuations of stock prices, but they’re ultimately far more substantive than that: Brands are narratives of business performance and the benefits it provides to customers , while reputation is the measure of confidence every stakeholder group has in the efficacy and reliability of that endeavor .

Both qualities are far more enduring than it’s popular to presume. Reputations are not lost in a day (with apologies to Warren Buffet), but rather decline slowly over time; crises are when those failures are made apparent to stakeholders. Similarly, brands aren’t opinion polls, or measures of any mental state, but the ongoing experience of customers with the products and services they consider, buy and use.

There’s scant evidence that the company recognizes any of this. It seems to be hunkering down as companies do when in crisis mode, and probably paying a host of “experts” for leading it down that path.

Dealers have publicly reported that they’ve been given little information, which they’ve sadly passed on to customers already affected by the recall, and I’d bet that they’re grumbling about it, to say the least. I’d also wager that GM’s corporate marketers are already working on the glossy advertising declaring its continued penance, while touting its commitment to the abstract ideal of safety.

CEO Mary Barra has dutifully apologized, and there’ve been minor staffing changes, but there’ve been no suggestions of wider-reaching changes, let alone announcements of major, world-changing initiatives. Its social media presence is muddled, to say the least, instructing customers on the recall within minutes of celebrating June sales.

It’s too bad, because GM doesn’t have to act like it’s in a crisis. It just may have been given this century’s greatest branding opportunity.