Buick Goes for an Emotional Brand Campaign for NCAA

Buick is sponsoring the NCAA and as part of that effort they launched a new series of inspirational videos featuring several athletes who have overcome adversity. The campaign is called the Human Highlight Reel and as part of the launch Buick bought the homepage ad unit on YouTube last Monday.

This is all part of Buick's transformation or is it reclamation as the brand moves upmarket as a premium brand. This is the segment brands like Lincoln, Acura, Infiniti and to some extent Cadillac has played in for the past couple decades. Some people also call them segment affordable luxury. It's that awkward place between general consumer and luxury consumer vehicles, essentially the brands that cannot directly compete with the likes of Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Lexus; although, Lexus is a primary target of all these brands. Lexus breaks convention as they have beaten the Germans in some vehicle segments.

Buick wants to own the Premium space and as Cadillac continues to evolve and yes become a direct competitor with German luxury brands, now is the time for General Motors to show keeping the Buick brand, after closing several others, was a good decision. Fortunately, the products are getting better but the brand itself still has a major way to go as it assumes a more lofty aspirational brand identity.



The Human Highlight Reel campaign is a fairly typical attempt at facilitating the brand change. I'm sure the consumer research came back showing that Buick considers or the aspirational customers Buick wants to attract are free thinking (think brand agnostic), self motivated people who don't want to follow the herd. As a way to attract these consumers, the brand is trying to appeal to that person through inspirational content that shows the spirit the brand wants to embody or at least thinks its desired customers embody.

I'll admit it is personally difficult for me to see Buick as anything other than my mom's car. She had a nice, yellowish 1976 Buick Skylark coupe. It was mom's car from 1976 until the late 1980s when she finally sold it. Amazingly, it looked just as good the day she let go of it as when she bought it off the car lot. I definitely get my cleanliness when it comes to cars from my mom (my dad's Nissan Sentra had several weeks old McDonalds bags and various trash all over the floor. No wonder they got divorced.)

Fortunately, others may be more open to the Buick brand than I am and fortunately too they are making some solid products to back up the marketing change, because it doesn't matter how bad you want to attract new customers - you have to have the right products to meet the desired change.

Honda’s Brand Image Campaign Begins with Failure

Scientists talking about teleportation and magnetic levitation -- is there still room for such lofty brand building campaigns in a depressed automotive market? This is what the New York Times asks about a new marketing push from Honda.

Honda: Dream The Impossible

Honda says it is a campaign “focused on [their] values as a company.” The intro video talks about how it takes failure to get to success. Seems if this worked we wouldn’t need automotive industry bailouts and GM would be the most successful company ever.

Company engineers, designers, and executives share their optimism and enthusiasm for Honda as a company. To keep interest from waning, the film producers also found it best to include some celebrities like Danica Patrick, Christopher Guest and science fiction writer Orson Scott Card., not exactly people that generate a lot of buzz, but still better than an engineer talking.

The whole effort is an attempt to raise brand favorability. What seems odd about this is that Honda is a very successful brand that obviously put this work together in late 2008 before anyone expected a big drop off in industry sales. In fact, Honda was having a pretty successful sales lead when people started dumping SUVs and looking for fuel-efficient cars as an alternative lifting sales of the Civic without any need for brand marketing.

Perhaps this is Honda’s attempt to be positive and show how struggle can lead to positive things, a much better approach than Dunkin Donuts trying to communicate a “Kin Do” attitude.

I really don’t think much about these brand-lifting campaigns (see the Lexus L/Studio blog entry,) especially when they are more about the company talking to itself than its customers and this series by Honda suffers this issue. There is very little about product or expanding my knowledge about Honda’s products. Instead I’m left listening to some pretty boring diatribes on inner self and trying things over and over again, you know the kind of stuff that makes you feel good about buying a Honda lawnmower or $35,000 SUV.

The web site must be at an early stage as it allows users to browse the content. Today that content is three documentary videos: Mobility 2008, Kick Out the Ladder, and Failure: The Secret to Success. You can filter content using 12 content filter types and by most popular (I’m guessing that would be what ever video plays as the intro) and recently updated. That’s it. There is no other content on the site other than Subscribe and Share links in the top navigation.