Or at least that’s what Cadillac wants you to think with the launch of its new "halo" model, the totally redesigned CTS.

By now you’ve probably seen photos of the new car, usually clad in a rich red color. You certainly cannot miss the front end styling. The grill is a massive, angular, heavily chromed affair with an outsized Cadillac emblem (a shield that looks very similar to the Maryland state emblem surrounded by chromed Roman like garlands) floating in the center. The headlights are vertical and quite angular, giving the front view an angry, almost Preying Mantis sinister quality. Here is another reference that the Cadillac designers probably were not thinking of when they created this car; the design looks exactly like a take off of the uniforms in the 80s futuristic cop fantasy "Judge Dredd" (you know, the not so cultish film that featured a very serious and buff Sylvester Stallone in the lead role).

So, I thought I’d use this Judge Dredd inspired CTS, the brand new Cadillac model that the company hopes will be a halo for a troubled brand, as a marketing case study for my blog. Cadillac needs this new car to be a huge hit. After having major success with the new Escalade a few years back (it quickly became the favorite of hip hop and rap artists and their middle class white guy wannabes), the Cadillac brand has been slipping and sliding of late.

It seems the Escalade was not the halo Cadillac was hoping and planning for it to be. Even with the Escalade’s initial sales success, the rest of the Cadillac line has pretty much languished in recent years. This included a hot two-seater sports car that was basically a Cadillac skinned Corvette. (It did not catch on, probably because of its its high price point and lack of brand street cred…why buy an expensive Cadillac sports tourer when you can get the real thing, like a Porsche, Corvette or sleek new BMW coupe, for close to the same money?) According to an article in the new Conde Nast Portfolio Magazine, in June 2007 Cadillac sold 31 percent fewer cars compared to the same month a year ago, despite offering some of the deepest discounts in the industry. The Cadillac brand has been floundering and the CTS is the newest, hoped for savior, just as the Escalade was a few years ago.

It’s amazing to me that American car companies are constantly having to swing for the fences to just stay in the game. Instead of staying true to their brands — like BMW and even Volvo, with its boring but safe family cars — Cadillac and its parent GM (and also Ford and Chrysler, too) are constantly shifting, losing focus, chasing frequently fleeting new opportunities and generally confusing and confounding car buyers (the few American car exceptions to this rule are the Chevy Corvette and pick up trucks from Ford and Chevy).  Given its high stakes marketing challenge, I thought I would examine Cadillac’s recent moves to try to draw some conclusions about the state of the US auto industry (once the jewel of the US industrial crown) and about marketing and communications in general. 

There was a time in America (and the world) when the Cadillac — the Dadillac of the fifties and sixties — really was the automotive brand leader. It was once the halo of halos in the car business, and it had substance to back up what passed for hype and bling 50 years ago. During its golden age (from the early classics of the teens to the sleek land yachts of the sixties), Cadillacs were not only big, sometimes very elegant and usually cushy and powerful, they were also technologically advanced. Mostly they were coveted and beloved as the true automotive gold standard. They stood for something — power, prestige, quality, technological advancement — and the brand delivered year after year. The seventies had a few interesting Cadillac models, but by that time the US car makers were into their multi-decade slide that brought them to the perilous state they find themselves in today. The current automotive gold standard in America is Japanese-made (Toyota and Honda), with and the luxury mantle being owned by European and to a lesser degree Japanese brands (mainly Lexus and Infiniti).

In the past few years, Cadillac has been trying to recapture some of that lost magic. I actually give them a lot of credit for trying. Their angular new styling that was introduced with the first CTS and Escalade a few years ago was an ambitious and courageous attempt by the company to stand for something in terms of design and brand ethos. Led by the Escalade’s hip hop success, Cadillac’s gamble worked, at least for a while. But, the brand has again veered of course and now must rely on the radically designed (at least the front end is radical) new CTS sedan to get it back on track.

I will get to the CTS and this major brand bet in a moment. First, another slice of brand Cadillac. A colleague recently pointed me to the new TV spots for an aging Cadillac platform, the DTS (formerly the De Ville, which truly was your father’s Cadillac nameplate). Developed by Modernista, the new ads are part of the new "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit Of" campaign that was launched early this year to breathe new life in the Cadillac brand. In the most interesting of the spots, four late twenties to thirty something guys get out of a hulking DTS sedan in the parking lot of a diner, and they run into four middle aged guys also getting out of a new DTS. The older guys (pretty buff for their age) stare at the young turks and say "Welcome to the world of gentlemen." The young guys look kind of proud, and retort something like, "Thanks…it’s good to be here." Then everyone goes to lunch. It is a fun, knowing moment, juxtaposing the two generations of "gentlemen" and the Cadillac DTS that links them together.

The spot almost works. The problem is that the commercial is not very credible. Those young guys just don’t fit in the old fashioned DTS; I realize that is the idea (the ad uses the line "contemporary classic"), but it does not fly for me. It looks either like it’s a company car for a salesman (which is unbelievable, because it would not be a Cadillac but something like a Chevy Malibu sedan), a rental, or worse, a loaner from daddy (again, the Daddylac!). Actually, big American sedans from the 70s, 80s and 90s are hot again for the hip hop set. They buy these old American boats and install enormous wheel and tire sets on them, sometimes painting them outrageous colors. But, that trend only works for older cars that the guys buy for almost nothing and then totally recondition in a totally new way. The new Cadillac DTS will be a great candidate for this hip hop transformation — in about 25 years. The new DTS is just a big, outdated sedan with old technology and crappy gas mileage.

Cadillac’s hot ad agency is doing its best to "contemporize the brand" (great example of how we marketers love to create words), but it just does not wash. And, in those new DTS commercials lies the true problem of today’s Cadillac (and most American car brands). It really comes down to an essential brand problem. Cadillac just does not know what it wants to be, and/or it has not (or cannot) settle on a brand positioning that really will appeal to those four young guys who presumably are the brand’s future customers.

You cannot contemporize a staid and old fashioned brand with clever advertising any more than you can fool people into thinking today’s Jack Nicholson is the same hot young actor from Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider. All marketing starts with what the customer/consumers wants (or thinks she/he wants), and then moves on to the product itself. In Cadillac’s case, the DTS just does not live up to the cool promise of the clever new Modernista ads. As such, don’t expect the ads to move the cars, or the brand.

Will the new CTS help? Cadillac is making a huge bet on styling, and that is pretty dangerous given the fickle nature of consumer tastes and fashion trends. The better marketing move for Cadillac would be to figure out what it truly stands for and then create everything around that.  A good place to start would be the four attributes that have traditionally (from the 60s backward) defined the Cadillac brand: power, prestige, quality and technological advancement. If Cadillac honestly lived up to those authentic brand attributes in everything they do, they could have a fighting chance, even in a world of Lexus sedans that parallel park themselves and 500 HP M5’s from BMW. Think about it. Is the new DTS prestigious and technologically advanced. No. How is the quality? Fine, but not approaching Lexus or top German standards. Is the DTS powerful? Sure, it has a big V8, but it also guzzles gas, which hurts the image today.

Instead of doing the really hard work of building and nurturing a brand by staying true to the compelling attributes that built the cult of Cadillac from the beginning, the company seems to be hoping that flashiness and interior "French stitching" (whatever that is) will suffice. It never does.

Here is an important cultural benchmark for hot automotive brands. When the producers of the hit HBO show "Entourage" wanted to give the boys an SUV, they first got them a Hummer, and then an Escalade, naturally. Good for Cadillac. But, when Vince and Eric wanted to splurge on hot new cars when they finally hit it big with Aqua Man, they bought Aston Martin roadsters. (Now there is a brand that discovered its truly authentic essence years ago and has steadfastly, and very successfully, stuck with it, even while updating the product to meet the demands of a new age.) Do you really think the Entourage guys, or any other hot TV/movie personality, would drive the new CTS on camera? Cadillac is making a big deal of Jay Leno "endorsing" the new CTS. I know Leno is a major car guy, but he is about as cool as a Donald Trump signature suit from Macy’s. You get the picture.

Again, the big idea for Cadillac — and any car company looking to reclaim past glories or forge new ones — is simply the following: Choose what you want to be (Volvo as the safe car and BMW as the driver’s car) and stay true to that through thick and thin. I wish Cadillac all success, but I doubt its new CTS will be the brilliant halo model that returns the brand to the leadership position it once enjoyed.

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