It is impossible to keep up with every aspect of car culture. You have to pick your areas of focus; choose the events to follow that interest you most. For me, there are two fascinating occurrences happening simultaneously, but in diametrically opposite directions. One is the birth of an American brand: USF1. The second is the impending death of an iconic automobile brand: Saab.

Let’s take the bad news first. Something happened in 1990 when GM acquired 50% of Saab, and something REALLY happened in 2000 when they bought the other 50%. Some will say that GM sucked the lifeblood out of the brand by trading on decades of consumer loyalty bred from uniquely Saab innovations, like an ignition key on the floor, instead of developing innovations on their own. Saab did, in fact, keep pace and even developed some promising models under the aegis of GM, but moved from the endearing quirkiness of rational Swedish engineering to the more economical rationale of cross-model parts compatibility and shared-source manufacturing.

The problem with GM Saab started in 1993, or rather the 1994 model year when things got ugly. Saabs were, up to this point, an acquired taste aesthetically, but were never confused with any other car on the road. The profile was distinctly “Saab”. 900 fans were let down by the 1994 version, and the brand never really recovered as the car changed over the course of a decade to resemble many cars, all seemingly merging towards the center of the herd where it’s safe. GM took a brand that offered a spectrum of ingenuity and innovation and boiled it down to model lines based on other cars that GM had on hand, and therefore their surplus of cheap parts. Most 900, 9-3 and 9-5 models to follow were based on lesser platforms (Opel’s Vectra, for example) and utilized parts common to the GM family tree. In effect, GM diluted the Saab heritage by marrying cousin to cousin and made it impossible to build upon all that strong Swedish DNA.

Now GM has Saab up on the auction block. A few contenders have raised their bidding paddles, including fellow Swedes Koenigsegg and more recently the Dutch fabricator Spyker, both manufacturers of exotic and ridiculously expensive supercars. For unknown reasons, these negotiations seem to end consistently without a deal and a handshake. At this point, it looks as if Saab will either be retired altogether or bought by an obscure emerging market manufacturer and cannibalized of all of its assets. Glimmers of hope reside only in the silver lining behind cloud number 3: Subaru. If there is any sense in this world, Subaru will buy Saab.

With a few exceptions, GM Saab continued to offer basically the same car for 15 years. In 2005, this was taken to the opposite extreme when GM, in its brief but most inspired moment, created the Saab 92-X by badge engineering a Subaru Impreza WRX (also partially owned by GM at the time) with Saab styling, comfort and handling. This car still ranks near the top of my candidate list as a replacement for my 1990 Saab 900T that I sold 3 years ago. I haven’t had a car since, but that’s another story. The 92-X represented a brief moment of hope for me that great things could come out of the unholy union of an elegant Swede descended from jets and a nimble Japanese rally car pumped full of horsepower. *sigh*

Speaking of horsepower, how about some good news? It’s January. Among gear heads, this is a quiet time of year, with the only outlet being Top Gear episodes on BBC America. If you’re really Jonesing, you crawl over to internet videos of obscure automotive competitions like Race of Champions in China or Ice Rally in Finland. Not this year. So far, 2010 is WAY different. Not only will we get the Winter Olympics and World Cup Soccer, this year will mark the first year in my lifetime that the US will field a Formula 1 team. In a sort of perfect storm scenario, team USF1 has managed to time their launch to take advantage of three unique circumstances: open grid spots; investor faith in emerging teams; and a surplus of talent and technology.

Formula 1 teams are monstrous efforts that draw heavily on a multitude of resources, not the least of which is financial. When you figure that, in the past, heavily-funded team like Honda, Toyota, Minardi, BMW and Jaguar invested millions of dollars season after season only to finish consistently in the lower half against equally-funded teams like Ferrari, Mercedes McLaren & Red Bull, it becomes a difficult sell to convince outside investors to invest in a fledgling team. All five of those teams decided the back half of the grid was not worth the cost and will not be on the grid this year.

Last year, a rookie team, Brawn GP, did not exist (in theory) 30 days before the start of the first race, however, they took top honors in both of the categories for which Formula 1 teams compete: The Constructor’s Championship and the Driver’s Championship. This opened the door for any new team to solicit funding during a time (2009) when funding was extremely hard to come by without forming a partnership with a major auto manufacturer, which is the prevalent route among F1 contenders. Richard Branson came on last year as Brawn GP’s only sponsor. This year, Sir Richard felt confident enough to simply field his own team.

Navigating the political structure of the sport is like trying to explain tax law to a third grader. The governing body of F1, Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) is the official legislative body and creates the rules that govern teams, cars, drivers, testing, management, budgets, etc. During the summer of 2009, they tried, as they often do, to regulate the sport to reflect major overtures in public sentiment and to safeguard the sport. In years past, these regulation changes focused on increasing the sustainability of the sport and controlling the excessive spending on technology and testing. The sport has no lack of detractors that bemoan it as a hideously obscene display of inefficiency, excess and indulgence. Short-lived solutions like “No tire changes during a race” last for about a season until the winds of public opinion change, and then they go away.

This year, under the dark cloud of the global recession, the FIA attempted to place a regulatory cap on team budgets in order to level the playing field between mega-manufacturer-sponsored teams like Mercedes and those that are funded privately like Force India. In the end, the teams argued the point into submission, but not before taking a very careful look at their own operations and how they could slim and trim down to a sleek $35 or $40 million operating budget. With that came realizations that there was indeed fat to be trimmed and so the trimming began, leaving a lot of uniquely-skilled individuals looking for work. Couple that with the withdrawal of 3 or 4 teams (depending on how you count) and the soup lines start to stretch around the block. The same can be said for the racing world in general, stretching through the other open wheel classes, NASCAR, LeMans, etc. This affected not only teams, but also nearly every aspect of the complex network of suppliers, fabricators, manufacturers, and testing facilities. Suddenly bargain deals were everywhere, and USF1 is not the only team taking advantage of this. The grid this year will also see new teams Lotus, Virgin, Campos and Sauber (minus BMW support).

USF1 announced themselves officially as a team in March 2009, although the organization started 6 or 7 years ago. Since March, they have been a SkunkWorks-type operation, with precious few information leaks, most of which centered around tertiary-level organization (they have yet to announce who will be driving their cars). This is an odd way to begin a relationship with a future, and currently non-existent US fan base. But looking closely at the team structure reveals some promise in the names that show up on the non-technical side. USF1 managed to strike a partnership deal with Chad Hurley (YouTube) that may affect the way we watch F1….sure why not? Hurley knows how to handle popular, mainstream media. Other rumored sponsors include Rich Silverstein of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, so USF1 should have some flashy marketing and catch phrases like “Got Speed?”. Others rumored to be part of the mix are Bay Area-based IDEO (unconfirmed..but I’m crushed anyway) and Octagon Worldwide in Charlotte, NC. Within that mix is some incredible potential for the USF1 brand to be engineered from scratch into an American legacy.

So my days over the next three months will be spent watching the rapid emergence of USF1 and monitoring its growth. USF1 is uniquely positioned to offer US race fans a home team on the world stage of auto racing. Skeptics will immediately draw parallels from this lofty endeavor to the uphill battle that US Soccer has had over the last two decades since Americans just don’t gravitate towards sports that we do not absolutely dominate. We could care less about rugby or cricket, we give marginal deference to hockey and soccer, and you can just forget about cars that turn right while racing. Conversely, we’re addicted to YouTube and Twitter since they bring us to an intimately close vantage point. Maybe the dream team that USF1 has assembled can pull it off. I’ll be watching.

Walk through your friendly neighborhood Target and you’re sure to experience a veritable street fight in the aisle between brands on top of their game. Cool brands, hip brands, brands for moms, brands with a heart, big brands, brands that are good for the earth, brands you’ve grown up with – all battling it out for your attention and your dollars.

And one of the best brands you’ll encounter at Target is, in fact, Target.

It’s never labeled as such, obviously, because Target has realized that it can gain more strategic value by creating house brands targeted (forgive the pun) towards specific shopping categories, not the entire store. Rather than populate every aisle with same looking generic packages featuring the store brand, Target has cultivated a rich assortment of brands that go straight after what users need, want and desire. Step into the candy aisle and you’ll discover a colorful candy brand named Choxie (by Target). Walk down the auto aisle and you’ll see twenty feet of brushes, sponges, hose attachments and polishing cloths under the Vroom brand name (guess who?). Target has changed the game on their house brands, because they don’t feel like house brands anymore – they’ve become good products people just want. And the important point is that structuring house brands this way helps differentiate Target from its retail competitors. Unique products create unique aisle experiences, and unique aisles means Target doesn’t feel like Wal-Mart and the rest.

Which brings me to their latest creation, Up & Up.

Target developed Up & Up as the new brand name for household consumables like paper towels, diapers and disposable dishware.  Gone is the Target bullseye and clean, generic brand package. In its place is a new brand with a more modern look and feel. The reasons for change make sense to me…

What I don’t get is why Target abandoned the street fighter mentality that has worked so successfully for them in other parts of the store – taking on the big guys aisle by aisle. For some reason they didn’t create new, distinct brands around baby, food storage, cleaning, beauty, and the rest. They just made one big brand to try and cover an entire corner of the store. But the rub is that these are unique categories, with unique dynamics and unique shopper needs.

Too unique for just one brand to satisfy?

Did Target miss a big one here?

I’m sure that folks like P&G, J&J and Method are sure hoping so.

Sun Chips, owned by Frito Lay, announced plans to replace their packaging with a fully compostable bag by Earth Day 2010. Below is a link to the commercial, as well as their website and an article on Treehugger.

I wonder why Frito Lay wouldn’t have made a bigger statement by replacing ALL of their brands’ packaging with this new bag. Hopefully they plan to do so eventually.

Sun Chips commercial

 sunchips.com

treehugger article

During a recent trip to San Diego I was introduced to what is probably the first innovation in ice since the icemaker. It’s called Glace. It’s a sphere of crystal clear, zero impurity ice, machined out of the same blocks used to make high end ice sculptures. Each sphere comes in it’s own vacuum sealed pouch and if you leave it out of the freezer for 2 minutes to cure and then drop in your Jameson’s and it disappears. It keeps your drink cold without excessive melting . Although the whole concept of luxury ice seems excessive, it was a unique drinking experience.

What’s in a name? I’m pretty sure old Billy Shakespeare didn’t have spray lubricant and Napa Valley on his mind when he wrote Romeo and Juliet but that question has come up for me recently based on a couple of ads I’ve seen.

The first is from an online campaign  I saw by a coalition of vineyards seeking to protect “place,” the regions in which their grapes grow.

The second is a print ad for a new product from PB B’laster, a small but successful player in the lubricant category, that launched something called PB50. Can you guess the competitor they’re taking on?

Name is naturally an important part of any brand and these ads are trying to achieve opposing goals around brand name in their respective categories – the former seeking to prevent encroachment from knock-offs, the latter attempting to play off WD-40’s brand equity and poach users.

I’m not sure trying to steal brand name (or place) is a viable strategy in the long run. A product, or service, is only as good as the value it delivers. Name is a heuristic to which users attach experiences. If that experience is poor then it doesn’t matter if you come up with a clever smokescreen of a name, your product will fail in the long run.

If PB50 is worth its salt, it should be able to stand on its own. Perhaps the thinking is that playing off the name will encourage trial and the resulting product performance will drive repeat purchase and loyalty. I’m not buying it.

The issue of the vineyards is a bit more dicey. If cheap bottles are being sold as Champagne, the poor quality erodes the value of the French region and its output while playing in a different price range. I lean toward the belief that playing a game with knockoffs like this is a race to the bottom.

As I see it, a brand whose name is being encroached on can:

1. Choose to ignore the knockoff and potentially see share erode

2. Race to the bottom in order to maintain share and run the risk of damaging the brand

3. Push back as the wine campaign is doing while drawing attention to the competition

4. Spend resources on improving the brand and its offerings, counting on the user to see value, not just price

It will be interesting to see what WD-40 does. I’d go with option 4, not an easy road but one that allows you to act, not react, maintain control over that which is in your purview, and protect profit margins along the way.

What do you think? Would you choose a different option? Are there any good examples of brands that launched into the stratosphere off the back of another brand name or are they all just low-price players?

The March 22 New York Times ran a story on the troubles Harley-Davidson is experiencing as its aging boomer audience buys fewer bikes. The article mentions recent efforts being made to bring in younger and more diverse riders but apparently even that nod to a potential brighter future wasn’t enough to satisfy the leather-clad powers that be in Milwaukee.

This past Sunday, readers were treated to a full-color, spread ad in the Times business section from the Motor Co. in response to what they viewed as unfair treatment. Brilliant copy written in the form of the American Flag started off, “You can file our obituary where the sun don’t shine.”

Laced with attitude, the ad goes on to ask a series of either/or questions – cower or live free; succumb to fear or seize the throttle – before laying down the Harley ethos in stark terms for the nation.

“We see American companies and good old American ingenuity wrenching the life back into this economy of ours.”

It’s a powerful statement in these economic times and a perfect fit for the brand. Americana. Rebellious attitude. A call for “us” to push back against “them.”

After spending close to three years at the Motor Co. I found myself swelling with pride in seeing the ad. It’s a knee to the groin of malaise. A poke to the chest of anyone who says America can’t come back from this. And what’s perhaps most important, the ad speaks to everyone. You don’t have to own a bike, work at the company or even hold their shares. You just need to have a desire to fight back, to want to feel good again. And that in turn reinforces the brand in the public’s mind.

Former Starbucks CMO Scott Bedbury said, “A brand is a metaphorical story that’s evolving all the time. This connects with something very deep – a fundamental human appreciation of mythology. People have always needed to make sense of things at a higher level. We all want to think that we’re a piece of something bigger than ourselves. Companies that manifest that sensibility in their employees and consumers invoke something very powerful.”

Harley may be down right now but as long as they keep doing this, their brand, and by extension the company, will be just fine in the long run.

Screw it. Let’s ride.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/business/economy/22harley.html?_r=1

What is going on in terms of the first family and their fashion choices today is nothing short of fascinating from a brand (and socioeconomic and cultural) perspective. Michelle Obama is doing an amazing job of communicating her style, class and taste while portraying an accessibility and normalcy that people can relate to–and crave right now. The choice to dress the girls in J Crew (and J Crew’s wise support of it) is truly interesting.

Did J Crew just become America’s brand?

On a recent shopping trip to Mitsuwa, a chain Japanese grocery market in California, Christy found an interesting group of products that occupied a good portion of the local Japanese retail shelf. Promising to deliver an ‘authentic’ drip cup of coffee right to your desktop was a small, thin package no larger than one and a half inches wide and six inches tall. We thought it just might be brilliant idea!

We bought a box of five packets for eight dollars to try it out (click above for the step-by-step process). The most transformative part of the whole experience occurred when we bent the filter horizontally and ‘bam!’ the ground coffee, previously hidden, was revealed. The manufacturer tastefully glued the filter seam so it stays closed during transportation and ‘pops’ open when you bend it. The rest of the process was actually very intuitive as we added hot water and watched coffee come straight through the filter. It was a very good cup of coffee that may have been a bit expensive, but the experience rocked!

Are you on Facebook? Do you like hamburgers? You’re in luck.

Burger King has put forth its latest viral marketing experiment – The Whopper Sacrifice. The challenge asks you to ditch ten friends, and in turn, you receive a free Whopper. With the quick installation of the application on your Facebook profile, the Sacrifice is on.

In typical Facebook style, when you defriend someone, your friendship merely dissolves into cyberspace – no one is notified. Here’s the kicker with the Whopper Sacrifice: the name and likeness of the friend you ditch shows up in your feed, noting, for example, “John sacrificed Joel Kaplan for a free Whopper”.

While it’s a noteworthy concept, it’s also an ethical dilemma, reminiscent of high school days when, as Heidi Klum would say, “One day you are in, and the next, you’re out.” The campaigns tagline reads, “You like your friends, but you love the Whopper.” Over 230,000 have been sacrificed thus far.

While this creates a buzz around Burger King, the real question remains: is inflicting public humiliation really worth saving a couple bucks on a burger?

Stunningly handsome, wickedly fast, and equipped with plug-in hybrid technology, Henrik Fisker’s newest creation, the Karma, is paving the way to a cleaner future for the performance-luxury market. Fisker, whose résumé includes the Aston Martin DB9 and V8 Vantage, is hoping to capitalize on what the company is calling the ECO-CHIC sensibility: environmentally conscious, futuristic, and uncompromising in quality. Delivering on that ideal, the Karma is an astonishing feat of automotive design. The proprietary technology, Q DRIVE, delivers an initial 50 miles of gripping, ultra comfortable travel with zero emission. And a full-length solar roof allows for cord-free charging and self-contained cooling for the interior, while the car is parked.

The flagship Karma will be priced around $80,000 with additional models to follow. For Americans who aren’t willing to trade their Maserati for a Prius, the Karma will be music to their ears.