Chrysler announced it on the Super Bowl earlier this month: Detroit is back, not necessarily as a city in America, but someplace different, perhaps distant in place and/or time, from which both American ideals and great cars now come. "This is Motor City, and this is what we do," rapper Eminem narrated as scenes of Detroit flashed across the screen for a whopping two minutes of expensive airtime (total gig is rumored to have cost $9 million, though be sure the content will be repurposed across multiple platforms).
I loved it...at least until I started to see how far Chrysler is taking it.
It's serving as the backbone of the brand's communications, appearing front-and-center on Chrysler's website (clicking on the video takes you a YouTube channel to see the spot again), and you can click on importedfromdetroit.com and bring up a website that sells branded merch, showcases people who appeared in the Super Bowl spot, and automatically loads the movie again. The product featured in the movielet was the Chrysler 200, which is being rolled out to dealerships with a kit that positions them as "embassies" for the car "imported from Detroit."
The agency behind this great imagery is Wieden+Kennedy, which specializes in broadly thematic advertising (it got Levi’s to partner with a down-and-out town in Pennsylvania) and won both agency and creative agency of the year honors for 2010 from Advertising Age.
Here's why it's bad branding:
It turns legitimate heritage into unsubstantiated myth
Chrysler was founded by engineers in the 1920s who wanted to invent well-made cars at lower prices. Some of its early innovations were incorporated into fighter planes. It, along with GM and Ford, built the American car manufacturing industry and its headquarters in Detroit. All of that is distant history. The situation is dire and complicated, and certainly remains unresolved. Chrysler has been bought by foreign companies (First Daimler-Benz, and now Fiat) and a private investment firm (Cerberus) and still managed to bankrupt itself and require $7 billion in bailout money from the American government. It employs a fraction of the people it did in its heyday. The city of Detroit is a hollow, scary shell, even by the most charitable admission.
So where's the truth in the campaign? What is it exactly that Motor City does other than suffer the humiliations of a global economy that disfavors it, and does so alone because of a national government that has been missing in action for a few decades?
Chrysler and its communities possess a rich, meaningful, legitimate heritage that could and should tug at our heartstrings, but we get none of it in the campaign. It substitutes broad, faux messaging for specific, real facts. The campaign could have built our trust and engagement on joining Chrysler in what it is working to become (or to which it hopes to return); instead, we get a bunch of feel-good nonsense about what it already is...which is simply not true.
It's not the right car
Nobody has much affection for the Chrysler 200, which is the lead vehicle for the "Imported From Detroit" branding. It's a modified Sebring, and pretty much everyone thinks the Sebring was a pretty stupid car. Chrysler admits that the 200 is a place-holder for a truly redesigned successor model that’s still a few years away. Most early reviews peg it as an outstandingly average product that performs at or below the averages for its category but is outperformed by more popular models imported from real foreign countries.
So where’s the truth in the campaign? Is the 200 the car that evidences Chrysler's return and which it thinks American consumers should look to in order to make their conclusions about the company? God help them if that's the case; my gut tells me that a lot of old they-won't-know-the-difference car marketing nonsense is behind the pitch.
Imagine instead if Chrysler revealed more of this truth, but did so in a positive, moving forward way: How about offering some special service deal that utterly locks 200 owners into intensive relationships with their dealerships, or a novel financing plan that positions a 200 purchase as a downpayment toward the new vehicle coming later? There are so many real things Chrysler to do -- truly do what it says it does in the beautiful Super Bowl movie -- but instead we get a vague promise about the wrong car.
"Imported From Detroit" is the wrong metaphor
I understand the strategy behind the phrase (I think) since the "imported" moniker is attached to quality, and it also plays on the strangeness or otherness of Detroit these days. But that's also why it doesn't work: most of the quality cars sold in America these days are built here, especially in the high-volume midsize sedan category, and Detroit is an American city in an American state, not somewhere else. The concept simply works too hard to turn everything on its head in order for us to see things in a different way. It's an extended intellectual and emotional exercise that prompts an immediate visceral reaction that’s positive (at least it was for me) but then falls apart if you think about it for any appreciable amount of time.
So where's the truth in the campaign? Why couldn’t it simply (and creatively) encapsulate the reality of Chrysler and Detroit and encapsulate ideas of return and affirmation of ideals that are "at home" in every city in America?
Chrysler could have chosen to accentuate its everyman-ness instead of highlighting its somewhere elseness. This would have allowed consumers to feel and think past the immediate knee-jerk patriotism evoked by the little movie and get to the actions required of real patriots. The campaign could be about rejoining the union instead of remaining a foreign land to the rest of us.
Instead, it chose to create a beautiful ad and a schmarty-pants marketing campaign to sell us a so-so car via smoke and mirrors. For all of its novelty, it's business as usual in Detroit.
