Can a Volvo not be a Volvo?
Here are the comments of a student I have in an undergraduate marketing class about the "new" Volvo:
"Wow.... Talk about a great example of expanding your product.
"This definitely isn't Grandpa's Volvo! I like the ad campaign I've been hearing on the radio. They are playing off of their decades of safety and reliability ratings and adding them with sexier styling trying to break out of the "safe" mommy and daddy market.
"Sexy, speed and safety... Damn hard combo to resist if they can deliver... Check out the motortrend ad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtldv9eh3R8&feature=fvsr
"Gotta love it.... When I was growing up a neighbor of a good friend of mine was an engineer for Volvo... Let's just say he was a platinum sample of '60s creativity. All they ever drove was Volvo. Pretty good handling, couldn't argue the safety features and ratings, beyond that..... dang boring car... I love how they are exploiting the break from the traditional Volvo styling. The description of the new model being ‘Naughty' adds some fun and a bit of daring to those who would normally buy it for the safety, a great excuse to break from the straightjacketed resposible choice for the usual consumers of their product and an excellent draw for a new consumer."
Here's my take:
Ironically, I have almost the exact opposite take. Looking at the long Volvo ad on YouTube reminds me of every other car ad I see on television --- they film the car from a low angle, they show it zipping around tight curves and doing graceful sliding turns, all to the tune of some driving rock music. Not much different from a Pontiac-Chevrolet-Mitsubishi-Ford-Dodge-Nissan (to name just a few) ad to me. It's what I call "me too" marketing --- Volvo is now saying, "See, we've got a sexy, sleek car, too."
However, it's very dangerous to try to change a long-established image. Volvo has equaled "safe cars" for decades, they owned that image, nobody could touch 'em --- from a marketing viewpoint a very enviable position to be in. So now they're suddenly telling me they're sexy.
I see two possible problems with that... There are already lots of well-established sexy cars out there, so why do we need another one? And, then, does that mean Volvo is not as safe anymore? It's almost like Wal-Mart suddenly saying, "Well, besides being low priced, we're also high fashion like Nordstrom or Lord and Taylor." Is Wal-Mart "believable" as high-fashion? Is Volvo "believable" as sexy?
I suspect why they're doing it, though. You said it yourself: Besides Volvo's safety image, they also had an image as "mom and dad's suburban station wagon." Well, young people today don't want "mom and dad's suburban station wagon." As all kids want to do, they want to differentiate themselves from their parents, have their own identity, make their own statement. So Volvo was losing market share to what were apparently "sexier" brands of cars, except maybe the youg people weren't necessarily choosing those other cars because they were sexier, maybe they were choosing them because they were different from what their parents drove.
It reminds me of the Pepsi / New Coke debacle a few years ago. The Coke folks thought people were buying Pepsi because of the taste, so they thought they would bring out New Coke, that tasted like Pepsi --- "See, we've got it too." Except maybe people chose Pepsi as much because it was not Coke as they did for the perceived taste difference.
Pontiac tried for something like 20 years to change its image, in fact, in very much the same direction that Volvo is going --- from stodgy to sexy. Where's Pontiac today?
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