Not Your Father’s Cadillac

So you may wonder why someone who doesn’t have a driver’s license, and who hasn’t driven a car in over 6 years is so interested in car commercials. Perhaps it’s my American blood, but spinning tires, sharp angles, sleek lines, glass, steel, and blazing fire have as much sex appeal as Angelina Jolie… before we realized just how bonkers she was.

Cadillac, the only remaining American luxury car brand, has unleashed a new commercial which plays on this appeal, and in an instant has stolen the term ‘luxury’ from those boring, saccharine Lexus holiday spots and returned it to destiny-defining, skirt-chasing, alpha male status…

Branding is big business, and Cadillac shows it goes much deeper than a new logo. You can say one thing about the new Cadillacs… you can’t mistake them for anything else on the road. While other manufacturers are building bland and uninspiring clones of one another, Cadillac has beaten their own path, and branded their automobiles in a way that harkens back to the brand’s roots. The protruding headlights and the angled tail fins that defined their models from the 50’s and 60’s have been streamlined into a fiercer, sleeker 21st century style. The new Cadillacs are as instantly recognizable as the old ones, even though they don’t come in hot pink. This is branding done right.  Hard to believe… an American auto maker doing something right.

Even harder to believe more companies don’t think of their brand with such large vision… especially in a day and age when brands try to re-invent or re-invigorate themselves continually.  The recent GAP debacle and the utter failure of my [_____] (that’s the new mySpace… get it? me neither…) are only the latest in a long line of failed re-branding attempts, and the sound of an enraged blogosphere is now the death-rattle most companies dread.

In many cases, this failure of vision extends beyond the visible “branding” the consumer sees. It stems from companies forgetting to do what they do best. When a company forgets that, its branding will undoubtedly follow down this misguided path. Some would argue that rampant monetization is doing that to Google right now.

It wouldn’t be a surprise… we’ve seen this before, with behemoth companies like AOL and Yahoo trying to incorporate everything within their walled gardens, and no longer doing what made them great. Microsoft’s brand suffered from trying to keep everything under their own umbrella, instead of focusing on what their users experience. In the end, Microsoft’s brand came to stand for frustration and disappointment… and a great commercial can’t fix that level of brand frustration. The product no longer did anything well, and became a mish-mash of internally branded elements, with no overarching theme connecting them. As the desktop and installed software experience became increasingly complex and difficult, web-based apps have come along to address the simple tasks that the larger applications no longer do quickly, or well.

And Cadillac recognized the importance of this need for a large vision by applying this design aesthetic to ALL of its models, not just the aforementioned luxury sportscar. They realized that if you buy a Cadillac, it should LOOK like a Cadillac, even if it’s a modern-day mini-van. They’ve woven this distinctive style into the DNA of their brand, and once again captured the elegance, power, and allure… of your father’s Cadillac.