Awake, and Driving

Brandweek, April 3, 2000 by Jeff Green

When we looked at ourselves, our brand attributes versus our competitors, we were very strong in fun-to-drive vehicles and that was the image we had developed with some of our vehicles like the Eclipse. Excellent styling. We've been very strong in that area. Because we are a Japanese company we were strong in the quality, reliability and durability aspect, but Toyota and Honda own that so there's no sense playing our drums on that. We can't make enough noise to outspend them. So we took a different approach with the launch of the Eclipse.

The other thing that we did, probably even more important, is we made a fundamental decision that we wanted a consistent voice and image in the marketplace. So we basically got rid of our agencies and settled down with one. One agency that does all of our national advertising, dealer association spending--and by the way, we've gone from $30 million in spending to $100 million in just two years with the association. They're also doing all of our collateral, all of our direct. They're doing our Web site. They're doing our Hispanic advertising. So now we have one agency to do everything. The reason being, we needed consistency. We needed to leverage every dollar we spent. We can't outspend Toyota, but we can leverage every one of our dollars.

What we found is our brand awareness is up 20%, which in the upper funnel is a pretty big movement. We think that it's starting to pay off. We launched the "Wake up and Drive" campaign with Galant, and developed a look and feel for Mitsubishi that we almost think a lot of people are trying to copy. When we launched Eclipse, we tried to use a slightly different approach. They're breaking through and we've done a good job with Deutsch. We've had a 37% sales growth in one year and when we finish this year we'll be probably be up 60% in sales in two years. We're the fastest-growing Japanese automaker. And all of that started with putting that stake in the ground and sticking to it and then having the consistent voice in the market.

BW: You currently let dealers pick from a menu of advertising that varies in intensity from pure brand to hard sell. That means each ad has several versions to choose from. Is this a strategy you plan to continue?

PG: Absolutely. We will continue. With every new campaign, fewer and fewer [dealers] are taking the really tough, old-style selling and [more] are moving more toward the brand type. Deutsch calls it "brandtailing," where you have the combination of branding but also you have that selling.

At the end of the day we get measured by how many vehicles we're selling in the industry and they've been able to find that balance with the dealer association. You know, we have 165 dealer associations now covering almost 98% of the country--up from 12 associations, with seven different agencies, and covering 25% of our volume in the major centers in 1997. There was no consistency whatsoever. What we found when we did our branding research was that the message that we were giving in our dealer association was actually contrary to the message we were giving in our brand advertising. The two were against each other. So now we find the two are working together. The other thing, too, that we did, is that we're selling more Mitsubishis now than Eclipses, Galants or Montero Sports or Spyders. Three years ago we were an Eclipse company. Five years ago we were a Galant company--depending on what we were launching.