Auto Marketers Grapple with the Glow of Celebrity

Auto Marketers Grapple with the Glow of Celebrity

By Dale Buss

Where would Buick be without Tiger Woods? General Motors executives can’t decide if they really want to find out. They believe the golfing phenom and global celebrity (leading in this weekend's Dubai Desert Classic) is so popular he -- rather than Buick vehicles -- became central to the brand over the years.

But now that the Enclave has rescued Buick from the sales doldrums, a new advertising campaign shows division executives are unafraid to put a renascent Woods front and center with the stylish crossover vehicle.

“These spots are very significant because they represent both Buick and Tiger moving to another stage in our life cycle,” Maria Rohrer, Buick’s marketing director, told AutoObserver. “We’ve used him in testimonial before, but we’ve never used him in this kind of emotional way. It’s wonderful when the stars align like this.”

But recently Mark LaNeve, GM North American vice president of sales, service and marketing, provided a glimpse of GM’s hand-wringing over Woods’ role in Buick’s marketing. “Tiger is great, but I don’t like any celebrity at the core of a brand,” he said. “So we want him to plus-up the brand but not be the core of the message. We want him not selling but validating.”

GM’s changing relationship with Tiger underscores both the rewards and the perils of “dancing with the stars” in automotive marketing and advertising. LaNeve and other industry executives are quick to utter the mantra, “The car is the star.” Yet they dabble with celebrities in more and different ways than ever before.

Consider what you’ve seen lately in just a cross-section of automotive TV advertising. There was anti-establishment icon Bob Dylan shilling for XM Radio and Cadillac late last year. Crusty kickboxing TV and movie star Chuck Norris is still looking like a bull in a china shop in an ad for Honda’s Ridgeline. Woods has been plugging for OnStar as well as Buick; country-music star Toby Keith also is still promoting Ford trucks after all these years.

Harry Connick Jr. is driving a new MKX in Lincoln ads that show the singer-actor going on a hopeful post-Katrina tour of his home town of New Orleans. And now that "American Idol" is on the air again, expect Ford to further fudge the “car-is-star” mantra when its vehicles share the stage with Idol contestants each week in those specially made, upbeat music videos aired during the broadcasts.

“Celebrities can always be great if they fit strategically,” said Deborah Meyer, the new Chrysler CMO who helped forge a few relationships with Hollywood types as a top marketing executive of Lexus, her last stop.

“I don’t like to use them as spokespeople for a campaign or a model. I’m more interested in making sure the people know the great benefits and features of vehicles instead of the celebrity. But when you have fun ways to use them and have them as part of a campaign or a message, I will.”

The “C” Word

Of course, Meyer wasn’t at Chrysler when the company committed perhaps the ultimate boner in the use of a celebrity for marketing -- a huge step backward that besmirched the practice in the industry for years afterward. In 2003, Chrysler committed $14 million to a three-year endorsement deal with singer Celine Dion, reportedly against the advice of its ad agency, BBDO.

Soon, Chrysler had the songstress spreading her wings in the company’s new Pacifica crossover vehicle, which at the time was considered a crucial launch. And almost as quickly, the ads -- and the relationship between Dion and Chrysler -- tanked. Dealers complained the ads sold more of the star than the car. And Pacifica gained little sales momentum.

“We were trying to take the car to a place that said, ‘This is classy and elegant, but you can afford it,’” recalled Jim Schroer, who was head of Chrysler marketing at the time -- but not for long after. “There were millions of people in consumer research who testified that it was a good choice. She even beat out Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil as choices because she was an approachable, classy person.”

Now president and chief executive of the Carlson Marketing agency in Minneapolis, Schroer conceded “we might have been premature as to when we started” the campaign because “it was launched before it was obvious to buyers that the brand was going to stand for classy, elegant styling. If we’d maybe waited to launch the campaign until we had the (newly styled) 300 available, it might have clicked.”

But outsiders are harder on Schroer. “She was the wrong celebrity for the product,” said Art Spinella, president of CNW Research, a Bandon, Ore., automotive-market research firm. “It was an appeal to an upscale audience, and Celine at the time was pretty much a Branson, Mo., kind of celebrity. The mix and match didn’t work.”

Tiger: Buy the Tale

The case of Woods and Buick is more positive but just as instructive in the complications of tying an automotive brand to a celebrity. They hooked up in 1999, just as Woods’ prospects of dominating professional golf were becoming obvious. Buick was the original and largest corporate sponsor of the Professional Golf Association Tour, and men of boomer age and older -- the typical pro-golf fan -- are Buick’s target. Thus, not only did landing Woods’ continuing endorsement seem logical, Buick regarded it as a great coup.

But over the ensuing years the partnership hasn’t quite worked out as Buick had hoped, for at least two reasons. The first is Woods himself: Though he has continued to pile up impressive achievements in what has become the sport’s most fantastic career, and now ranks as one of the best-known individuals in the entire world, he really doesn’t excite consumers.

“He’s a great golfer and a helluva nice guy, but he really doesn’t create an emotional connection between his personality and that of a Buick,” said Schroer. Exhibit A: About 88 percent of American sports fans, for example, know who he is, but only 40 percent have a positive view of him, according to a recent Q score. Compiled by Marketing Evaluations, these are the survey-based measures upon which advertisers rely in choosing endorsers.

The second problem was of Buick’s own making: its vehicles. The brand, until very recently, simply hasn’t put forth the most compelling products or overall marketing message and instead has been overshadowed by its prized celebrity endorser.

Woods and Buick ranked as “a classic case” of where “a celebrity is eclipsing the overall message,” snarked George Rogers, president and chief executive officer of Team Detroit, the agency joint venture that oversees Ford’s advertising. Even GM’s LaNeve conceded Woods “became core to Buick in how he was used.”

“Sometimes because of his celebrity there may be a chance to overshadow the product, but we’re really trying to use that (celebrity) to our advantage,” Rohrer said. And at first, Woods was little associated with Enclave per se. “We wanted to make sure the product attributes got highlighted,” she said, “because they’re superior to the competition.”

A Surging Duo

But things changed very quickly for Buick and for Woods, resulting in the remarkable new TV ads.

First, Enclave took off like a rocket. Buick already has logged just under 30,000 sales since the vehicle’s debut last summer, Rohrer said, about 35 percent more than Buick projected. New Buick customers account for 43 percent of sales. About 90 percent of Enclave customers are buying the high-content CXL model. Automotive press have given Enclave rave reviews as well. In short: There simply is no danger of this hot-selling vehicle being eclipsed at this point, even by Woods.

“This is all information,” Rohrer said, “that says something is happening to this brand.”

Second, Woods has become an even hotter celebrity commodity, if that is possible. Over the last few years, he has undergone significant personal transformation -- getting married, becoming a father and losing his own father in death. Yet last season was one of his best ever.

And so his millions of avid fans were rapt about the possibilities for Woods to elevate his godlike status in the game even further this year. Then he opened 2008 unapologetically postulating he could win all four of the game’s major tournaments this season, and blowing away the competition in January at Buick’s own invitation tournament in La Jolla, Calif., Woods’ fourth straight victory in the event.

“He has also reached a new stage in his life,” Rohrer said. “The man is so dominant mentally and physically, and in his game. He’s not fearing the competition. Now he’s about how can he be a better father and husband as well as player, and in general.”

The third development: Woods and Buick agreed he should begin putting a stronger imprimatur on Enclave. So Buick has just drawn two 30-second TV ads from a long testimonial by Woods that is offered at Buick.com.

For people who have followed the Buick-Woods relationship, the full testimonial is a true revelation. A goateed Woods is apparently not scripted as he talks about Enclave in two settings: seated on a country club veranda, and behind the wheel of an Enclave. He’s much more relaxed, much more personal and apparently much more genuinely engaged in the task of promoting his sponsor and its products than he has ever been depicted before.

Woods seems to demonstrate a real fondness for Enclave and casually mixes in references to his family. For example, Woods talks about how Enclave is big and versatile enough to accommodate his wife, Elin; baby daughter, Sam; and even their two dogs. “We consider the dogs part of the family,” he says. “I’ve got a nice little packing system that I do, and everything just fits perfectly.

“It’s as smooth as smooth can be,” he also says.

“Now that we’ve expanded our family, with Sam, I’m looking at safety in a whole new light … You have to be in a vehicle that will protect, and Enclave definitely does that for us.

“With the quiet tuning, it (makes Sam’s) screaming seem a lot louder.

“You feel like this car was made specifically for you. You can feel the passion and the detailing.”

GM is trying to spread Woods around a bit more. He also can be seen, for example, in an advertisement for OnStar. Yes, he’s driving a Buick -- but GM at least found a way to stretch the equity inherent in Woods’ endorsement to one of its other brands.

And LaNeve believes Woods “has value beyond Buick, for instance with his great concern for community service.” Woods is “a big asset” for GM marketing, he said.

But don’t expect Rohrer to allow Woods to show up in ads for another GM vehicle brand. “We probably wouldn’t share him with another (car) division,” she said. “The whole idea is to keep him tied to the Buick family.”

Cadillac Embraces Celebrity

Undeterred by Buick’s iffy experience with Woods and other automakers’ challenges with celebrities, Cadillac has been determinedly upping the star quotient in its marketing. Star turns with Cadillac in TV advertising recently have included actor Andy Garcia and former National Football League star Tiki Barber. Also, "Grey’s Anatomy" and "Private Practice" star Kate Walsh has been featured on MyCadillacStory.com talking about her grandfather’s Cadillac.

One asset Cadillac has, almost uniquely, is as a luxury brand, it’s always had enough cachet to be associated with the rich and famous. Elvis Presley, for example, was well known as a Cadillac fan, and many professional sports stars have been enthusiastically “down” with the Escalade SUV.

“We place a high emphasis on authenticity” in the use of celebrities, said Liz Vanzura, Cadillac’s global marketing director. “With other brands, you can’t understand the association with celebrity. With us -- it’s part of our history.”

Still, Cadillac’s latest celebrity hook-up, with Dylan, has caused some head-scratching. Dylan gained fame in the 1960s as a decidedly countercultural rabble-rousing musician. And although few things could be a bigger part of the military-industrial complex than General Motors, 40 years later Dylan approached Cadillac about a partnership -- and Cadillac took him up on it.

“First of all, he’s a major fan of our brand,” Vanzura said. “Second, there is still a major mystique around him; his entire career has been about choosing his own path, and that is the kind of spirit we admire about our brand. And third, we were approached.” XM Radio came to Cadillac with the news it was working with Dylan on a radio show that would be centered on Cadillac, she said.

So Dylan showed up as the star of a multi-channel marketing campaign for the 2008 Cadillac Escalade that integrated his XM Radio show, "Theme Time Radio Hour," with TV ads in which he’s driving and is shown getting out of an Escalade. His Cadillac-theme episode on XM premiered October 24, 2007.

Honda Gives Norris Some Props

Honda’s brand personality is to be above such foolishness as celebrity endorsements. “We’re fortunate to have a strong brand and brand names, and we don’t feel it’s critical for us to borrow imagery from celebrities,” sniffed Tom Peyton, senior manager of national advertising. “So as a general principle, it’s not something we’re looking for.”

However, Honda marketers appear to be having lots of fun with their current TV ad for Ridgeline featuring Norris, the archetypal tough guy who also recently has been seen shilling for Mountain Dew. The commercial opens in an elegant restaurant, with coffee being poured into fine china and a harpist playing “Greensleeves” in the background.

Then in walks a grubby Norris, clad in black, sort of as an American Ninja-style warrior, growl on his face and casing the well-dressed ladies who are chatting quietly. “Tough meets classy,” says the announcer. “The stylish, four-door Ridgeline, built by Honda.”

Peyton said Honda used Norris “because he sort of fit the theme of the commercials that we were going with, more so than we had an intent to use celebrities.”

Ford’s brushes with celebrity marketing have been focused on its trucks, where   Keith and fellow country star Alan Jackson have touted Ford trucks over the years. But Ford spokesman Jim Cain was careful to note the relationship with Keith, for example, is “a natural fit” because he owns a ranch and comes from a family that has owned Ford trucks for years.

“A lot of the celebrity link-ups you see may make for a memorable ad, but the connection to the brand or product is usually a bit nebulous,” Cain said.

Team Detroit’s Rogers said he’ll continue to make sure Ford’s association with celebrities reeks of authenticity and never gets in the way of the company’s improving products. “The bottom line,” he said, “is the car is still the star.”

Michelle Krebs:  is Editor-in-Chief of AutoObserver.com. Follow @AutoObserver on Twitter.