In the 1950s and 1960s, Cadillac was king. The brand had a confidence and a swagger worthy of its status at the top of the luxury vehicle market, and sales were brisk.
That trend held for the next couple of decades, but by the mid-1980s the brand was fading. The company’s vehicles left buyers uninspired, opening the door for new competitors who stole away market share, especially among younger customers. No longer the top nameplate for luxury, the brand dropped to third on the list of most popular luxury cars.
As the average age of a Cadillac owner moved toward 70, the brand became regarded as “an old person’s car” at the very time the division most needed to position itself as the vehicle of choice for the style-conscious, youth-obsessed baby boomers who would control the luxury market for the next few decades.
The company’s marketing efforts fell short, too. The low point might well have been the television spot the company produced in 1997. It featured a supermodel in a revealing leather outfit alongside a cartoon duck to introduce the Catera, dubbed “The Caddy that Zigs.”
The spot was subsequently pulled off the air after female GM executives (and reportedly, the wives of some high-level executives) complained loudly about its blatant sexism.
Something had to change, and in the case of Cadillac, that something was the company’s brand image. The automaker retooled its vehicles, which was the perfect opportunity to revamp its marketing campaign, injecting it with the energy of rock music and focusing on the driving experience the vehicles offered.
By all counts, it has worked. Today, the carmaker’s average customer age is down to 59 overall, with Escalade ESV buyers averaging about 46 years old. Clearly, Cadillac is on its way back.
OUT WITH ZIGS, IN WITH EDGIER CARS
One of the first things that Jay Spenchian did after arriving at Cadillac as the new marketing director in 1998 was get rid of the much-ridiculed “Zigs” campaign. “I’m the one who killed the duck,” he says with a laugh.
Spenchian says many of Cadillac’s problems in the 1990s were inherent in the “brand management” marketing structure that GM had embraced. The program focused on selling the attributes of the individual vehicles to the detriment of the overall brand. That fragmentation diminished any sense of overall identity for the Cadillac brand.
“The brand is Cadillac and the vehicles all have to be children of Cadillac – they all have to ladder up to the Cadillac positioning,” he says. “They weren’t doing that. They were all off in different directions.”
Another issue at the time was the vehicles Cadillac had in the field. For example, the Catera just wasn’t the right fit for the marketplace, Spenchian says.
“It wasn’t hitting on the top three reasons for purchase in the segment, which are performance, styling and quality,” he says. “It was kind of middle-of-the-road on each of them. We needed to have a stellar entry that was going to hit on all three of those pillars to make it successful as kind of our anchor.”
