Repositioning a historic car brand? Here’s one I prepared earlier...

Last week I wrote something about the Jaguar controversy, and (by my standards) quite a few people read it. This week I’m writing another thing prompted by the Jag pile-on, but this one doesn’t feature an unsavoury culture war hate-fest or a massive pink car, so presumably no-one will read it. A shame, because it's very relevant to the new EV entrants currently launching in Europe. Here is how we repositioned a historic car brand in the UK – just to show you can do it…

The Task

Still with me? Maybe make yourself a coffee – this might take a while. The brand in question is MG – once a British manufacturer of much loved unreliable sports cars, now a Chinese-owned maker of well-priced decent family cars. They were already having great success, but needed to transition from small plucky challenger to serious mainstream volume player.

Most people assume that having a pre-existing brand name would be an advantage – I’m still not sure that’s the case. Older consumers had fond recollections of MG sports cars, but thought the company was no longer in business. They were confused to see the brand making cheap family SUVs (especially if they found out it was Chinese owned). We needed to reposition the brand for them so they understood that while the heritage stuff was great, that wasn’t who we were anymore. To younger consumers MG was a blank page. They had no awareness of the brand at all, and the task was exactly the same as that facing all the new entrants coming into the European market. We needed to establish some awareness and understanding on which we could build sales demand.

Getting on my soap box

And so to the crux of the matter – positioning. I’m sure my approach is old fashioned, but I think positioning needs to be distilled down to a simple and singular idea. If it isn’t razor sharp it won’t work. Car brands are nearly always terrible at this – probably because cars are complex devices with so many features and technologies, and we feel the need to communicate them all because they are all “important”. The trouble is, if you put everything into the positioning you end up with a huge amorphous blob of messages, and then you expect the consumer to try to pick the bones out of it. The fact is the consumer is probably dual screening while your advert is on TV (or wherever), and certainly won’t pay enough attention to do the work for you. They don’t care enough about your brand to spend time thinking about it – that’s your job.

The work

So – we had work to do. The first bit of heavy lifting was a study done by the clever folk at Total Media (they were new to the brand, and hired specifically for the task), who took their consumer data and did a cluster analysis to segment the market. We took that and examined the clusters looking at car purchase behaviours to identify the richest potential area. Once we had identified our target segment we could then look at the other data about “our” people to get a better understanding of who they were and what they wanted.

The next step was to come up with some potential positioning ideas for the brand. We narrowed down to a shortlist of about three, and then created some print ads using each positioning as the brief. They featured a made-up brand name and a generic vehicle image, with headlines and copy to communicate the positioning in typical ad-copy speak. We then recruited consumers using our cluster questions so we could test our propositions with our target consumers to see if any of them were motivating.

Two of the three ideas were fairly typical automotive fayre (“living your best life” type messages - the fact I can’t remember them says a lot), and one was thrown in as a wild card. It was a very simple and very direct value proposition, built around the proposition “Get More”. The truth is no one liked it internally, but when we tested it with our target consumers it was the clear winner. Buying a car is a big deal for them, and they worried about getting this big purchase “right”. The idea of getting more for their money was exactly what they wanted – and it gave them the satisfaction of thinking they were getting a smart deal. They wanted to think of themselves as savvy buyers, so there was an emotional benefit in the proposition. They also liked the straight forward nature of the proposition – they didn’t like a lot of the more esoteric marketing messaging we tested - this felt believable and genuine to them.

By this point in the process we had a new creative team on board in the form of M3. They took the “Get More” proposition and fleshed it out into a (really good) brand document we could use internally and with our other agencies to keep everyone on-message. And then they started using it – creating consistent and effective communications that we knew our target audience would notice and understand. We became the "Get More"brand - for years.

The results

We didn’t get to go to a big London hotel for a posh dinner. We weren’t presented with a large lump of laser engraved perspex before having our photo taken with someone who was probably on Breakfast TV. Honestly that wasn’t unexpected – “Get More” is not a very sexy idea in the world of marketing. But the fact is it worked – we used “Get More” as the basis of every piece of communication for several years, and were even old fashioned enough to use it as a strap line everywhere the logo appeared. Brand awareness and opinion grew remarkably rapidly, and with that so did sales. MG made the transition from niche to mainstream, and are now a regular top ten brand here in the UK (after 11 months of 2024 they are outselling Vauxhall – I’m still struggling to get my head around that one).

So what?

Well first - experience shows you CAN reposition a historic car brand. I won’t rehash my Jag thoughts here, but I like what they are doing and I think it can work. But what about all the new car brands trying to enter the European market?

I don’t think any of them have a sufficiently tightly defined and targeted brand position to spearhead their attack, and I simply don’t understand why not. If you try to tell consumers seven things about your brand they will forget them all. If you tell them one thing seven times, they might actually remember it – and with it remember your brand. If you’re a local market brand manager you don’t even have the excuse of having to follow “the global positioning strategy”. Chances are you’ve been given a huge brand manual with a hundred messages in it – just locally pick the one that will work best and ignore the rest. Use it consistently for a few years, and if it works you have all the justification you need to fess up to the global team and make your decision official. Ask for forgiveness, not permission. I've done it several times and it never got me fired.

And what of my friends at MG? They have clearly been on a hell of a roll, and recently retired “Get More”. Looking at the new products like Cyberster, they clearly feel they are in a position to be “more” than just a value brand. The original document that first proposed “Get More” actually said that at some point it could be retired, and there was a transition plan to move to the next phase. I’m not involved anymore so I don’t know what they are going to do next, but I wish them well. And to all the other new entrants – it’s time for your marketing teams to roll up their sleeves and get to work. Pick one proposition. Have the courage to park the rest.

Mediaplus UK M3.agency Jamie Dunlop Lennon Kelly Stu Perry Tiffany Wilcox Christopher Richards William Brown John Dobbs