8/14/2019 By DUTCH MANDEL H. Wayne Huizinga Made a Dumpster Load

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By DUTCH MANDEL

H. Wayne Huizinga made a dumpster load of money the old-fashioned way—he carried out other people’s trash. Buhe did it with style. Overnight, garbage wasn’t garbage; it became “waste.” Picking it up was “managing” it, and th

was born Waste Management Inc. Talk about a brand challenge.

Automotive brand management belongs in its own landfill. Perhaps it is brand management as brand manipulation

that is the sesame seed under my gum. Do not maneuver me; I hate it. Besides, brand management is about reactive

after-the-fact spinning rather than active before-the-fact creativity.

It did not take a seer to recognize what Ferdinand Piech accomplished with Volkswagen and Audi (and Seat and

Skoda). He paid close attention to product detail—from fit-and-finish to quality to performance to style to interior

design—and transformed those companies.

Jim Hancock is about the smartest brand marketer I know. At least he talks a good game through a haughty

Shiraz. This 40-something ball of A.D.H.D. has in his résumé the branding of cartoonist Gary Larson’s Far

Side to T-shirts and coffee mugs. He was the man behind the branding of No Fear. Bright and passion- ate an

cerebral, Hancock runs a company called Cathexis (look it up) Labs. Once named among the country’s top 1

marketers by Ad Age, Hancock preached brands and their effect as an emotive tool.

Hancock’s current thesis is simple: Branding as we know it is dead. Branding relies on customer needs, butWestern civilization has no needs. Western civilization has wants and desires. And wants and desires can’t be

managed.Car companies have sated transportation needs. Now it is time to address transportation desires. (G

a sense there is slim room for cars or trucks as commodities with this line of thinking? Good.)

Embracing this need concept is paramount to companies that practice “branding,” especially old-line

industrial companies. And in The World According to Jim, the relationship between supply and demand has

almost completely reversed. While there once was a time when car companies could sell poor product, the

market forced them to change these ways. A most vivid example of supply side calling the tune.

Could this be a call for Bob Lutz, great product facilitator at GM, to rid us once and for all of the catch-phra

albatross that hangs around the company’s neck? Please shuck brand management and tiller GM toward the

almighty product.

Traditional branding meant adding value through the package—ads, image, even the in-store presentation a

the box—that surrounded the product. No more. To add insult to injury, all brand builders used the same

market research checklists to target the same group values and then tried to differentiate their brands from

those of their competitors. The result: ad messages that are spitting images of each other.Or perhaps the Satu

Vue. Here is a brand-choreographed, research-driven sport/ute with few differentiating attributes and no

automotive soul. Bland and underpowered. Maybe it should be called the Saturn Zarrella, instead?