Olds' Brand New Day

Brandweek, April 17, 2000 by Jeff Green

BW: How are your efforts going to attract more African Americans to the Oldsmobile brand?

MS: We are proud of our target marketing initiatives. You can see the results of our targeting to young people: Alero has some of its strongest sales rates to people under age 35, including tremendous sales results to women. Most impressive of all are our sales to African Americans, which have doubled in just eight months and hopefully are in the process of doubling again. That's through our partnership with [radio host] Tom Joyner as well as many other marketing initiatives to the African American community, including our joint sponsorship with Joyner of our effort to register African American voters in our Drive the Vote initiative. All those things, we think, are speaking to the African American community and continuing to drive our business there. Sales are up to about 3% of total sales, in line with a lot of competitors and among the leading divisions within General Motors in terms of average sales.

BW: Oldsmobile is the first GM division to consolidate advertising, promotions and Internet advertising into single brand positions. How is that program working?

MS: I think Oldsmobile has proven again and again that we are the leader in terms of integrated marketing with the automotive space and whether it's the work we're doing on the Internet or our partnerships with offline organizations like Tom Joyner and Drive the Vote or Aurora and Montreux Jazz festival, I think that again and again the best ideas are those that we can integrate on- and offline, that we can take across advertising and promotion and make consistent. We can partner with them and grow that brand. That is best accomplished through an integrated marketing and communications organization. I'm very proud of the team we've created to lead the rest of General Motors in those initiatives.

Our current promotion with the NCAA tournament with MVP.com is a great example. Through our marketing communications organization we were able to have advertising on the CBS tournament, we were able to have a partnership agreement with MVP.com and CBS Sportsline. We were able to have a test-drive program that was integrated into the advertising. We were able to have consistent radio and print. We were able to have college advertising programs so that the 64 colleges that were invited received special incentives on campus about Oldsmobile the day the NCAA tournament was announced. We were able to partner with Sports illustrated and sponsor their brackets and sponsor the CBS Sportsline online brackets. All of that was done by one marketing manager working in conjunction with Giant Step, our interactive agency and Leo Burnett, our offline agency. They were able to put that whole package together, and the reason we could do so, so quickly and so efficiently was because there was one central point of integration within our organization. The results have been fabulous. We've had well in excess of 100,000 people come interact with us in response to this program for test drives.