Identity Crisis
I’ve been spending a lot of time in Genesis cars lately. Every time I encounter one, I have to take a beat and acknowledge how unbelievably nice they are. The exterior and interior designs are refreshingly original and effective, they nail the balance of handling and comfort, and are just incredibly refined overall. The other thing that happens every time I drive one is that someone asks me what kind of car it is and who makes it. This is impossible to explain without mentioning Hyundai, which then leads to the absolute worst possible thing that can happen to a luxury car owner: having to explain to someone why the car they’re driving is good.
Years ago, an employee of a challenger car brand relayed to me a story about a woman who, as part of a focus group, drove a handful of competitive cars and came away saying she liked their car the most. When asked if she’d buy one, she said that she wouldn’t because she wouldn’t want to have to explain why she bought it. When you buy a Mercedes-Benz, it requires no explanation.
This, I think, is the primary problem that a luxury automaker faces if it intends to challenge the established leaders. Lexus did it successfully by hammering buyers of less reliable luxury cars with the message that its products would never break, and if they did, the experience of getting them fixed or replaced would be more or less pleasant. Lexus also backed that message up with fanatical devotion to quality. Audi went rallying and won, then went to LeMans and won, hammering all-wheel-drive and technical innovation messages the whole way. Prior to that, BMW hammered its Ultimate Driving Machine mentality. Before all that, Mercedes-Benz was just Mercedes-Benz. Other luxury automakers have, despite building individual models that are often better and more compelling than offerings from established brands, struggled to land on a fundamental brand proposition. This leads their owners to explain to their friends and coworkers how their car, if they do the research, is actually really good.
To continue this digression, when I was in my early 20s, I bought a MK5 Volkswagen GTI after months and months of research and wanting. If I’m really honest with myself, I’d explain that part of the reason I got rid of it was that I kept finding myself explaining to my friends, even enthusiast friends, why it was good despite it being slower to 60 than a contemporary Camry. I sold it and bought a ratty Porsche.
Other attributes are important; it helps if the products are good, it helps if they’re expensive enough to qualify as conspicuous consumption. But status object purchases usually require that others understand why the objects are status symbols. In the case of a lot of luxury items, that’s the only consideration.
There are a few different ways to get there in the car business. Believe it or not, the easiest way to do it is having a long history of great and desirable products and never really having a memorable misstep throughout that history. Alternatively, you can articulate a clear and verifiable identity/proposition and maintain perfect discipline in reinforcing it over time.
I don’t know anyone in marketing at Genesis, but I would say that as a whole, car companies are suffering for a lack of car people in their agencies and in marketing positions. I don’t mean people who have worked in the car industry, I mean people who are personally obsessed with cars. When the people charged with describing a car and naming its attributes don’t know enough about cars and can’t be bothered to learn, you get ads that are just footage or renderings of the car, a line about what kind of leather the seats are made out of, and a tagline like “Luxury. Precisely. Defined.” or “Everyone Drive Amazing” or “Go To Locations By Driving There.” These taglines also change every time a CMO gets the boot, which is usually about every other year. You’re asking the consumer to do a tremendous amount of work to figure out why they should buy your car or what it would mean if they did.
Making great products is the most important step, but it’s also the first step. Genesis, to its great credit, is on step one as far as I can tell. The next step, the identity part, has historically been a struggle for a lot of automakers. It’s particularly been a struggle for marketers who come from outside the car business and often don’t really necessarily understand or care about how car brands are built. To be clear, I don’t know that this is the case with Genesis. Based on interviews with current CMO Amy Marentic, who has auto-industry experience, it seems like they’re doing a lot of the right things. That includes providing opportunities for consumers to physically get into cars. She’s been at Genesis for about a year.
There’s evidence that it’s working, too. Genesis does sell cars, and last I looked the numbers have been growing. But I’m not talking about moving someone up from a Hyundai to a Genesis, or moving cars with cash on the hood. I’m talking about consumers having some idea of what the brand is and what it stands for, besides being the luxury brand from Hyundai, which as incredible as Hyundais are, is not helping. Genesis has been around for eleven years now. If I was in charge, my goal for the next decade or so would be to develop some kind of articulable identity. Something in which the word “Hyundai” doesn’t need to be mentioned.
Genesis is planning on going endurance racing. Racing can be the single most important and effective tool in automotive brand-building. Ask Porsche. The big caveat is that of the hundreds of car companies that have attempted to use racing to build a brand, only a small handful have had the discipline to do it effectively. One of the most memorable conversations I’ve had in this business was with Vinay Shahani, then of Toyota, who walked me through Toyota’s motorsports programs explaining the very specific marketing purpose each of them were designed to serve and how they measured success. For example, Toyota’s investment in NASCAR has been solely focused on the message that the company makes a lot of its cars in the United States. This has been the case through several different marketing regimes, and it’s been measurably effective.
It’s really hard to to maintain the discipline necessary to make racing pay off as an investment. Priorities change, leadership shuffles, the economy shifts around. There are a million ways to lose focus. Right now, Genesis has a great looking hypercar with a somewhat uninspiring livery. I’ll be very interested to see how they connect it to their road car business and brand.
There are promises of some great performance cars and the company has recently shown a number of very exciting concept cars, from gorgeous station wagons and supercars to lux-oriented off-roaders. They’re all cool and I’d love for Genesis to put some of them into production. But, I don’t think they solve the problem of defining what Genesis is.
The company does have a unique approach to design. The cars don’t look Japanese or European or American. It’s immediately clear that they’re different, which I think is something to hang your hat on. If you really look, you can find examples of Genesis trying to explain this meaningfully. The company has leaned on the idea of Korean hospitality, which is both nice and totally unfamiliar to almost everyone in the west. Are Koreans known for their hospitality? Is there a memorable, concrete anecdote that would help convey that to the public? How does racing support that?
These are all very difficult questions that have proven unsolvable for a number of otherwise competent automakers. As an observer it’s very hard to say what kind of internal dynamics are at play here, but it feels a lot like Hyundai Korea has a clearer idea of what Genesis is and means at home. After eleven years of selling cars in the United States, Americans should not be asking me what a Genesis is.
One response to “Identity Crisis”
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Great article. Speaks also to risks of automakers moving away from that identifiable brand identity – eg Volvo dropping wagon from lineup.
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