The Tanning of America (35 page)

Following in the Cadillac tradition of being about arrivals, Escalade was now also veering into the terrain of departures. The name itself embodied arrival and upward mobility, yet also being undeterred in the expansion toward all those destinations that sound slightly foreign—yes, global—places that might have previously been unreachable. Pure aspiration. Taking a word not in common usage like “escalade”—which summons the idea of force and speed, as in
escalation;
has Latin, Spanish, Italian, and French in its DNA; and was first used in the late 1500s—was a marketing stroke of brilliance. Touching on the power of making the old new, here are definitions from a 1913 edition of
Webster's Dictionary,
both as a noun and a verb:

Kim Brink pointed out that by doing this archetypal work and taking a word that once referred to how warriors conquered castles but had evolved to mean a form of ascending, climbing, moving up, mounting a campaign, or going up with steady progress, the internal positioning came through all the more coherently. “The positioning in our internal strategy,” she explained, “was invincibility.
I'm invincible. I'm invincible as a person and this sport utility vehicle makes me invincible on the road.
”

So the theme of having arrived and being in a place of success where departures were possible too led to mind-set marketing strategies and was also woven into design elements distinct to the Escalade. Kim said that the target consumer was the psychographic that would relate to that feeling, aligned with invincibility.

GM also didn't want to lose the importance of the past and all the stories of arrivals and emotional first impressions of Cadillacs. She said that when participants spoke about what was the essence of the brand, what made it cool, “color was a huge deal—pink Cadillac, black. It was always a color associated with it. So that drove some of our naming strategies. In the catalog, instead of calling it ‘green' we called it ‘Green Envy.' ” Some of the stories that included important historical events having to do with Cadillacs did add another layer to the code. These touched on a particular kind of departure as a passage from one place to the next. Many recalled that Kennedy was shot when he was riding in a Cadillac, even though it was actually a Lincoln. Some associate the ornate styling of a hearse with that of a Cadillac—a potent symbol of a departure.

The other major association to Cadillacs, of course, is the chrome. Kim gave examples such as “big expressive tail fins” and “big chrome bumpers.” “If you look at the design of Escalade, chrome is everywhere. Chrome rims, chrome badges, chrome door handles.”

Mike Bentley added that the word “shiny” was in most every story and memory having to do with a Cadillac. Again it related to the announcement of arrival—“you show up like you paid attention to your appearance.” Yukon, also made by GM, and Escalade share the same footprint, as Mike confirmed. But because of the added chrome, Escalade looks bigger, more invincible. He elaborated, “The other thing about setting it in the urban environment is that Escalade has hyper-potentiality. It represents more power than you'll ever need. But isn't it nice to have that excess of power in the urban environment? It emphasizes how much power you have. You are clashing two codes together: SUV off-road is clashing with urban.” This kind of juxtaposition when you merge two things that are naturally conflicting in cultural meaning, Mike felt, speaks to something very powerful in our human wiring when that merger works.

This was the process that Cadillac had undertaken to connect to its intrinsic soul of cool. To my knowledge, GM was the first automaker to study the booming aftermarket industry that had been supported by urban culture for some time and to design into it with the Escalade.

The aftermarket work wasn't just for systems that could prove how loud a car was or how fast it could go. That was version 1.0 aftermarket work. But when hip-hop superstars, athletes, and other high-profile urban culture figures started putting in spoiler kits, getting their luxury cars tricked out so they could raise and lower them to music, putting bigger rims on the car that let them stick out past the fender, adding all-chrome exhausts, changing out the grills, putting DVD-player screens in the headrests, and adding signal beams, that was version 2.0.

Kim Brink explained how these kinds of aftermarket features were incorporated early on, saying, “We did a lot of things with the product, whether it was hot technology with a DVD player or OnStar navigation, that appealed to that market, that made the driver feel invincible in trendsetting and in technological advances.” They paid special attention to urban culture to drive innovation and customization.

The eventual assumption—and it was correct—was that by including the customized elements into cars rolling off the line they would make those assets infinitely desirable in suburbia.

While all of those cues were incorporated in ongoing design and special advertising, there was also an effort not to be too heavy-handed in designing what GM thought was urban. Mike Bentley said that his colleague Susan Dockerly set the tone on that. She could have called up every hip-hop record label and offered them a fleet of Escalades. Instead, when the calls started coming in, they were able to cultivate relationships with musicians and athletes.

“If you push it,” Mike said, “you are brokering the conversation the wrong way. Marketing has to be conscious of that. Marketing is about facilitating the conversation. We wouldn't want to be seen sponsoring a hip-hop festival and having Escalade all over it and then inviting people from the suburbs. It's about authentically having things happen.” Seeding Cadillac into top music videos, for instance, became a much more authentic strategy without hitting consumers over the head or being phony.

Is this conversation between marketer and consumer—via the strobe of pop culture—about a product or a mind-set? Indeed, it's about both. But without the respect and willingness to honor the mind-set and to really see where culture is going, the product and its symbolism become seriously diminished.

When I asked Mike Bentley where he saw this tan mind-set going and what he predicted for the future of hip-hop/urban culture's impact on commerce, he expounded on ideas that were certainly in my understanding. Mike observed, “Urban culture is blending with digital culture.” In fact, he went on, “Digital culture is going to be the next phase of urban culture. Digital enables a guy living anywhere to feel a sense of connectivity. Hip-hop has gone from being a local indigenous culture to being the first global culture.” Mike saw the escalation of how hip-hop/urban is being driven by digital culture (in all media, but mainly social networks like Twitter and Facebook) as further killing off the demographic boxes describing types of culture. This was the conquering of castle walls separating populations. Bentley's prediction? “I think it's going to become ‘culture' rather than ‘urban culture.' It's going to lose the word ‘urban.' It will be the new normal.”

How, you may well ask, does this translate into marketing strategies? Well, that's where you take out the cards up your sleeve and play with the possibilities of tanning and reverse engineering.

In 2003, when I first went to Oak Brook, Illinois, to meet the McDonald's marketing team, they didn't have to tell me that the brand was in trouble. The global fast-food chain had maintained market dominance for decades by continuously building on their core story—tying back to the late fifties and early sixties, when a mind-set of reinvention had put the golden arches on the map and made them the successful symbol of founder Ray Kroc's refusal to bet the odds. With the crazy belief that he could take the template of the local success of one hamburger joint in San Bernardino, California, owned by the McDonald brothers, and turn it into a national phenomenon, Kroc—who was a marketing guy, an independent sales rep, and had never built a franchise even in his dreams—did just that. And the brand had never abandoned his four keys for organizational success: quality, value, service, and cleanliness. To reaffirm an earlier section we covered, Kroc also famously said, “We're not in the burger business, we're in show business.”

However, by the early '00s the global powerhouse that McDonald's had become was no longer fresh and new and running off the energy of innovation that had first made it a mass-market success. The brand was now entrenched in the realm of the Happy Meal, PlayPlace, mothers, young children, and families. And as the kids who grew up on that were becoming young adults, they were not staying loyal to the golden arches. Instead, competitors like Subway, KFC, and Taco Bell had been keeping up with the times and becoming more popular among hip young adults—urban/suburban/global.

Mickey D's problem was more loaded than having lost proximity to cool. It was possible that in adopting family-friendly marketing, the brand had unwittingly taken on baggage that was repelling the young adult target. A reinvention or brand extension or radical disruption would be tough because it wouldn't be authentic. Plus, any reboot focused on appealing to a hipper mind-set would risk compromising their core consumer base, comprised mostly of moms and young kids.

With those concerns, we came up with a series of revolutionary strategies that together would honor the essential brand values and respect core consumers while decoding and reinterpreting the same values in a way that would speak to global youth culture. It was about storytelling and revealing what had been cool all along. Where there were important changes and innovations to be made, the storytelling would be about the fun variety of new multicultural flavors and choices at McDonald's, and about loving a healthy, active lifestyle.

Reverse engineering helps tell the story and make it credible—by first putting it in a pop culture form that isn't connected in any way to the brand. Why do that? Because of the glut of product placement in various pop culture platforms, our savvy urban consumer is not as impressed anymore. On the other hand, the framing of fresh ideas and trends that are seeded into the consumption of pop culture and then can later reverse back to the brand is a much more invitational approach. Specifically, for McDonald's we were going to tell their story to the audience of teens and adults who were the most important market spending force for all the combined industries of entertainment—through music, the most powerful pop culture medium of all.

The team at McDonald's was hesitant. My point that our consumer target might be turned off by traditional means—that they were no longer compelled by seeing a celebrity holding a product and saying, “Buy this because I do”—made sense to them. When I made my pitch for music, they assumed I meant that we would have a celebrity doing the usual canned jingle.

Not exactly. There was another approach we could take: commission a song to be performed by an iconic artist; promote it months before McDonald's campaign; and at the same time start promoting the marketing slogan. We would follow the example of marketing movies and television shows. We agreed that if the song did well in the marketplace and the slogan hit the right chords, both would serve as a backdrop for a worldwide ad campaign that pulled out every stop.

The initiative was big, and so was the gamble. With Larry Light, the brand's chief marketing officer, championing these strategies that reflected his ideas about brand journalism, as I mentioned earlier, along with the support of then chief marketing officer of North America, Bill Lamar, and Marlena Peleo-Lazar, chief creative officer, everyone took a leap of faith that I know Ray Kroc would have applauded. For the first time ever, McDonald's would launch a campaign simultaneously throughout the world with a narrative that could translate into every market. The one artist I was certain could carry that weight on his shoulders and make it look like a stroll in the park was Justin Timberlake.

Many of my marketing and recording industry peers were shocked. To reach a global, multicultural, hip-hop-consuming audience, why not have an artist more aligned with the accepted understanding of urban sensibilities? Some looked at the brand values and wondered if a white kid from Tennessee who had risen to fame as the multiplatinum top-selling lead singer of the pop vocal group N'SYNC was the guy who could pull this off. Yeah, Justin Timberlake, who had blown us all out of the water just the previous year with his debut solo album, which had vivid hip-hop influences—and went on to sell seven million copies. Besides being a gifted singer, dancer, and actor, his cross-cultural appeal as a personality, with his self-effacing sense of humor and cool, smart attitude, was exactly what we wanted. He was the personification of the tan mind-set, appealing to a multicultural music audience, and, frankly, someone that McDonald's moms and children would love too.

The brand was used to celebrities being much more product friendly—like holding the burger and eating the fries. Meanwhile, Justin wanted an organic relationship and didn't think that overdoing the product angle would be necessary for consumers to realize that he was down with McDonald's. We had some give-and-take in the negotiations that followed that was somewhat nerve-wracking, but a marriage was made. I knew that Justin Timberlake was the right one to carry what McDonald's wanted to portray as their welcoming lifestyle.