Brands Create Customers

General Motors has announced that it is now “reviewing” the future of its super-sized Hummer SUV brand. A 60% plunge in sales in May focused GM’s attention on the brand, which had been slipping in recent years as gasoline prices soared and social criticism of the brand became more pointed.

GM’s options

According to industry analysts, GM’s primary options are to downsize Hummer vehicles to achieve better fuel economy, introduce some sort of hybrid or alternative-fuel power plant, or sell the brand outright. The downsizing process had already begun with the Hummer H2 and H3 models. Hummer concept cars are even smaller. If GM closes its two Hummer plants in the US, the only remaining Hummer production facilities would be in South Africa and Russia. That would leave a marginal presence.

Holes in the Hummer brand strategy?

The announcement by GM was not a total surprise. The Hummer had been hurting. Why, though, did Hummer paint itself into such a brand corner in the first place? Where was the brand strategy to advance the business beyond easily foreseen challenges? Indeed, future business books may cast the hulking, gas-guzzling Hummer as a brand that fell seriously behind the customer curve, if not grievously out of touch with reality. “Hummer” may wind up as a textbook case of how not to craft a brand.

Let’s take a closer look at the Hummer brand strategy.

Brand strategy, vision and approach

As we’ve noted many times before, a brand is “company potential X customer potential.” In reviewing a brand strategy we always begin with a set of diagnostic questions about the brand approach and its objectives, as they involve the customer. The following are some of those questions:

1. Is this brand part of the solution, or part of the problem?
2. What kind of (proactive) customer is this brand trying to create?
3. Where is this brand leading its customers?
4. What’s the vision behind the brand? What is it a brand of?
5. How does this brand innovate to create more customer value?
6. How is this brand a platform for customer growth?
7. How does the brand collaborate with customers?

There’s neither space nor time to answer these individually, so what follows are some general comments.

Gross vs. green

Since its inception, the Hummer brand has been a conspicuous flash point for condemnation by “green” activists and conservation groups. They view it as a threat to the environment because of its large size, unregulated emissions and heavy fuel consumption. It’s almost as if GM invited the waves of green opprobrium as a way of differentiating the brand—as a politically incorrect, crush-all-comers beast, positioned for those who felt threatened by an eco-friendly world.

Strategically, though, why bring out a brand with so many anti-green connotations when the vast majority of world brands—and GM itself—was beginning (in the 1990′s) to go gung-ho green, with the (green) writing clearly on the wall?

This was a battle that “gross” could never win. What was GM’s brand vision? Hummer certainly seemed to be leading customers toward a dead end.

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The practice of brands stands apart in the business world because brands have a strong moral dimension. Superficial brands ignore this dimension, but strong brands embrace it, and build it into competitive advantage.

For insight into the proactive dimension of the concept of “good” in business, I can think of no better place to begin than a recent essay by Paul Graham called Be Good.

Whether you’re working with for-profit or non-profit brands, this essay will help you envision a moral platform for your brand, inside and outside the company.

In an editorial, today’s New York Times takes issue with political forces attempting to change the American brand from one of freedom and opportunity to a brand of fear.

A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully. The evidence is all around that something pragmatic and welcoming at the American core has been eclipsed, or is slipping away.

An escalating campaign of raids in homes and workplaces has spread indiscriminate terror among millions of people who pose no threat. . . .

The politics of identity

There is a real brand identity issue here, too: the possibility that “America” is being subdivided into opposing nations of “Us” and “Them:”

The restrictionist message is brutally simple — that illegal immigrants deserve no rights, mercy or hope. It refuses to recognize that illegality is not an identity; it is a status that can be mended by making reparations and resuming a lawful life. Unless the nation contains its enforcement compulsion, illegal immigrants will remain forever Them and never Us, subject to whatever abusive regimes the powers of the moment may devise.

In recent years we’ve seen how politicians can create and exploit public fears to fracture a national identity for narrow political gain. The results are often devastating to the public and the brand.

“Pragmatic and welcoming”

In many ways the US Constitution defines the American brand. To use a phrase from the Times editorial, that brand is “pragmatic and welcoming.” The Constitution creates a platform of freedoms and rights that enables citizens to make the most of their opportunities, using their initiative and creativity. In many respects, that’s the American Way that sets the US apart. We’re a platform for achievement in a world where too many national brands are little more than ginned up identities used for public control.

Brands as collaborations

It seems to me that the strongest “country brands” are collaborations, where people are on the same page because they’re writing it together. These are places of vibrant culture and adaptation, where tradition becomes a platform for the new. Some elements are frozen in time and kept as static “icons” (often for the tourist trade), but the national brand itself floats upon a living, breathing culture, one that’s encouraged to grow.