ennis Lim has been tapped to find a way to create and communicate a compelling new image for Chevrolet, the brand that makes up over half of General Motors' sales. The assignment may be the challenge of the Korean American's meteoric career in the high-pressure world of advertising creative direction.
It's no secret that U.S. carmakers have been losing ground at an alarming rate to imports in the nation's trendsetting coastal markets. Go to downtown Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York or Seattle and you have to look hard to spot a few American cars among the stream of Toyotas, Hondas, BMWs, Benzes and Hyundais.
The reason for this state of affairs is generally recognized as the result of past decades of out-of-touch cars that failed to convey the kind of tightness that urban professionals take for granted as their birthright. What's much more difficult is trying to find a way to communicate the message that today's American cars are as tight as as any that came off a ship.
Enter Dennis Lim. His career started back in the mid 80s in San Francisco where he was part of the Ketchum Advertising team that launched the Acura brand for Honda. For a decade he worked on Apple at BBDO West. He was also the creative director for the Saturn launch at Hal Riney Partners. More recently he had moved south to Playa del Rey to head up TBWA/Chiat/Day's successful rebranding of Infiniti.
That's why it's a bit of a surprise that Lim was the number four pick of Interpublic Group vice chairman-chief creative officer Bill Ludwig. Each of Ludwig's top three picks backed out after accepting the post. Ludwig finally landed Lim to head up the creative effort for Chevy.
One of Lim's biggest assets may be the West-Coast perspective he will bring to Campbell-Ewald, a Detroit agency that had locked up the Chevy account since 1922. That's the kind of loyalty that Detroit and GM had gotten used to, and that's precisely what they lost three decades ago from much of their California customer base.
Lim's other asset is his origins as a graphic designer who moved up the food chain toward creative direction. The lack of consistent detail consciousness may have been one of the weaknesses shown by U.S. carmakers during their long market share slide. Lim has the ability to nail down the details to develop a brand book that will control every typeface, shade and curve of the Chevy message.
Lim will undertake nothing less than a total relaunch of Chevrolet "to get people over the problem with American cars". He recognizes the yawning gulf that has opened up between the brand's new world-class cars and the lingering old images. "In a way, we have a brand-new company with Chevrolet," Lim noted. He will hunker down in the trenches with Chevy engineers and designers to ensure that the communication becomes a two-way street.
How deep is Lim is willing to dig to extricate the brand from its slide? He's setting aside the long-running "An American Revolution" theme for one. The phrase hasn't exactly been resonating with cosmopolitan professionals in L.A. and San Francisco where any car brand must make a stand to stay in the conversation. In fact, that theme may suggest a sensibility as out of touch with the coastal crowd as the cars once were.
For the time being, as Lim's new campaign takes shape, Chevy will focus on fuel efficiency and the brand's quality to help address the gap between perception and reality. Malibu ads will play up the highest initial quality ranking bestowed by owners surveyed by J.D. Powers. But that isn't enough, especially when Chevy's new-car sales of 1.287 million in the U.S. during the first eight months of the year represents a 17% slide from 2007.
Lim know that he's under pressure to come up with a concept that will make dyed-in-the-wool import drivers sit up, take notice and throw out all their preconceptions about American cars. The fact that he has to do it under severe budget constraints won't make it any easier.
But Dennis Lim and a hand-picked team of three will begin work on a signal transformation not only of how Americans think about cars, but of how carmakers see who their customers must become if they are to thrive.
Now that really is an American Revolution.
