Cadillac was once so strong as a brand that it became an adjective for best-in-class. Today it has a brand problem. Too many of its drivers are old and will soon age out of the car-buying market. Over recent decades, German brands have trumped Cadillac on prestige in the traditional engine market, and Tesla is winning the electric market. (Audi is fast following into electric cars.) Cadillac tried a reboot in the past, through advertising and moving the headquarters to Soho, NYC. However, that did little in an age of transparency when actions define a brand, not spin. The top-of-the-line GM brand began a more genuine reboot in 2018 when it moved headquarters back to its roots, Detroit, and appointed a veteran engineer as president of the brand. The brand is building for the long term, according to a recent NYT article, but let…
Alignment builds a winning brand and business model for XIAMETER®
Brand trust is harder to earn in today’s economy? The pressure to cut costs makes delivering day after day on promised benefits more challenging. Social media creates messages that listeners deem more reliable than your own. And retaining meaningful and hard-to-copy differentiation has become more challenging in our copycat global economy. Silicon leader Dow Corning is one company that has managed to build authentic brand trust by clearly communicating its value promise, aligning people, adapting its business models, and letting its culture evolve to support its two brands, Dow Corning® and XIAMETER®. Dow Corning created the XIAMETER brand in 2002 to preserve market share as specialty silicon products commoditized, a savvy example of business model innovation that I wrote about in late 2011. The fully automated (from ordering to fulfillment) business model enables the brand to maintain profitability at the lower price points…