• by Karl Greenberg , February 10, 2011

In part two of an exclusive Marketing Daily interview, Joel Ewanick, CMO of global marketing for General Motors, and Chris Perry, now head of marketing overseeing Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC in the U.S., talk about how a global marketing purview creates a bigger pond for fishing for new creative ideas and testing them in different markets. The two also talk about GM brands in different markets.

Q: You said you don't want to be prescriptive, but if you see an advertisement you happen to like in one market, you have the ability to apply it globally?

JE: Well, one of the things I presented to the board of directors recently was an ad from McCann in Brazil. It showed a really good understanding of the core strategy of Chevrolet as well as an insight about that culture. But, honestly, this was an ad that could be done in the U.S., and a couple of other people from other markets raised their hands and said -- I think China was one -- "That could work here, too."

CP: What's interesting is that our counterparts in Europe and China are also embracing what we're doing because it's an authentic American brand, right? That's what they will be leveraging in the other markets. How far will they go with it? I don't know.

JE: What we are saying here is, the closer everyone stays to the core essence of what the brand is -- and we're talking about Chevrolet here, which will be our global mass-market brand -- the closer they stay to that core essence, the more likely we are able to define these things that cross over from market to market. I got an ad from China for the launch of the [Chinese market vehicle] Spark that we could run today in the U.S.

Q: When will there be a global Chevrolet campaign?

JE: You will see will see a lot of changes in five or six months and then big global events in summer of 2012. But it's not as easy as it looks; it takes time. It's herding cats. But if we do this right, and we leverage our brand cores both in communications and in product and service, there's going to be a huge difference.

Q: Did they create your global position as part of an effort to have economies of scale in marketing?

JE: No, it's not economies of scale. That's really important. This isn't about efficiencies. It's about best practices, the best work around the world, and having a unified brand strategy. Globally, we really have one big brand. For instance, Cadillac is in 39 countries around the world, where Chevrolet is in over 130.

CP: Sixty percent of Chevrolet sales are outside the U.S. People don't realize that. We are sold very well across the globe. The BRIC countries are very, very successful for us.

Q: And Chevrolet in the U.S?

CP: In the U.S., Chevrolet is 70% of our sales [among the four brands].

JE: Two weeks ago we did a cool thing. We went and changed the Daewoo brand to Chevrolet in Korea and that was a big deal. I was at the facility where we took the Daewoo down and put the Chevrolet bowtie up. It's now GM Korea. That means they now have Chevy Cruze there, which had been the Lacetti [the car that was sold there based on the Cruze]. The guy who's complaining about this is the parts seller who was selling the Chevrolet bowtie to people who bought the car, then took the old grill off and put on the Chevrolet bowtie and Cruze nameplate on. Koreans are looking for import cars. But imports have huge duties on them. So we have an advantage because now we can have an import car without import duty. The fact is, we build almost as many cars in Korea as Hyundai does.

Q: Out of how many plants?

JE: A couple of different ones. They do it out of three primary plants. I always thought that was fascinating: we do almost 1.7 million units production in Korea.

Q: Changing topic here, what do you think of the new Cadillac work, "Red-Blooded Luxury?"

JE: It's good but it's not what it should be. It could be better.

CP: We will be going up there to [Cadillac AOR, Minneapolis-based] Fallon and going through the whole campaign. I think the strategy is pretty spot-on, but we can still strengthen the executions of the strategy and they know that. Cadillac's a more ethnographically "outer directed" brand; Buick's more "inner directed." So we are trying to establish the two brands so they don't compete against each other. And we have to continue to play up the glamour, the sexiness of the Cadillac brand, and not just the attributes of the V-series [Cadillac's high-performance sub-brand, which competes against brands like Mercedes-Benz AMG and BMW's M performance-series cars].

JE: "Red-Blooded Luxury" is very good. That's not the part we are worried about. Making it too much of a performance brand makes us a little nervous. We are pushing V-Series too far, I think. But it's easy to fix, and it's really fine-tuning at this point. This idea of Cadillac as "derivative of nothing" is critical.