Some people still think that the reputation of a brand is established primarily through marketing and PR. That may have been true back when marketers controlled the message. It isn’t true in today’s interconnected world.
The strongest influence on reputation isn’t what a company says about its product, it’s what people actual experience with it. Whether customers love or hate your offering, they are sure to tell two friends, and so on. The channels for doing so are myriad, and the message is a far more credible and influential.
And so the most powerful way for us to establish a valuable brand is by consistently creating great products.
Duh, right?
Yet take General Motors, which keeps trying to convince us through its words, not its actions, that we’ve changed, baby, we swear.
One need only rent a GM car to be reminded that this is not the case. Each rental event is powerful negative advertisement for GM, reconfirming the “hoary old conventional wisdom” about GM’s lackluster quality.
This is not entirely GM’s fault. We who rent cars are notoriously price-sensitive. If rental agencies were to spring for more expensive and enjoyable cars they’d have to raise rental rates, and they’d instantly lose business to lower-cost competitors. Rental agencies need to acquire cars as cheaply as they can to keep prices down.
But this still doesn’t solve GM’s brand problem. What might GM do about it? Here are some possible strategic visions for them to steal:
- Option 1. Spin off a new, separate brand and separate models for the rental market, and distance them from the GM brand. Only permit premium vehicles to be rented under the GM badge — cars that will leave renters with a positive impression of the brand. Forbid any sub-par car from carrying the GM nameplate.
- Option 2. Think of car rentals not as a profit center but as advertising opportunities. Only permit GM cars to be rented that will reflect well on the brand. Give the rental agencies a break on price to make this possible, or perhaps lease the cars to the rental agencies or buy them back after they start to show poorly.
- Option 3. Throw in the towel on the old GM brand. It’s horribly tainted and will take a decade and a half a billion dollars to repair. Spin up a fresh new brand for vehicles to be sold to consumers that has no “G” and no “M” anywhere.
And of course, support the brand by making nothing but world-class quality cars from now on.
Any other options?
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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones. To follow him on Twitter click here.
More evidence that GM’s brand is in the hole:
“[GM's brand equity] certainly is negative these days: [focus groups] had reacted positively to photos of the Chevy Malibu — that is, as long as the Chevy logo was obscured.”