Let me see if I have this straight: Cadillac struggled to sell cars, so their solution was to leave Detroit for New York, where they struggled to sell cars, so their solution was to leave New York for Detroit. Really?
Four years ago, Cadillac hired aging hipster Johan de Nysschen to lead a brand transformation.
Road & Track said his “expensive advertising campaigns showing emaciated, scraggly-bearded, tight-jacketed metrosexuals posed in rain-drenched back alleys, urging the viewer to Dare Greatly flopped miserably.”
Four years later, de Nysschen is gone, but not before hiring Deborah Wahl, who claimed to have transformed McDonald’s during her tenure there as Chief Marketing Officer. Really?
Bizjournals says Wahl was pushed out because she didn’t get the job done.
McDonald’s president Steve Easterbrook said chasing customers who just won’t go to a McDonald’s was a mistake. And isn’t that exactly who CMO Deborah Wahl was chasing when she said McDonald’s needed to create ads that capitalize on “how teens and twenty-somethings are discovering information they trust?”
How did that work out?
Wahl and her handpicked team of hundreds of millennial social media experts were not able to deliver messages deemed believable and relevant.
So Cadillac’s relo didn’t work, their president didn’t work out, and now someone he hired who couldn’t sell $5 hamburgers is in charge of selling $50,000 cars?
We can hardly wait for the new ads.