Cadillac chief marketing officer Uwe Ellinghaus is an energetic guy—the kind who taps the tabletop for emphasis in conversation—and he doesn’t mince words. We sat down with the man at the L.A. show and got his lively, spirited take on Cadillac’s plans to match the German marques’ sales volumes—with new small sedans, more crossovers, and, yes, a passionless alphanumeric naming convention—as well as the importance of the high-performance V line and how Cadillac can succeed against what he calls “cold, soulless, sterile” competition.
RS: How much of your strategy is focused on the V series of high-performance Cadillacs?
UE: I’m of the opinion that, to a certain extent, V could really create a halo effect for the brand, because it shows our engineering capabilities better than any other car. [Those cars] cannot just rival Germany’s best, they will simply beat them, and they’ve already started doing that. These cars show how serious we are in transforming the brand, and that we are really serious when we say we build the cars that the German competitors no longer build. Not that they have unlearned the capabilities, but their volume aspirations are such that they can no longer afford to build the driver’s cars that are so nimble, quick, and fun as the ATS and CTS.
What about the competition’s performance cars?
I really think we have a unique advantage [over M, AMG, and Audi RS] to build an alternative for high-performance drivers who pay more consideration to the design of the car. We want to be a little bolder than the Germans, we want to be a little more unapologetic than they can be. The CTS-V, believe it or not, has significantly younger and far wealthier customers than the [regular] CTS. Wealthy you would expect, given the price tag, younger you probably wouldn’t because of the price tag. This is a clientele who so far do not really fully get behind Cadillac, because they still have a little bit of the legacy of a grandfather’s car.
So you’re totally abandoning the old luxury ideal?
Yes. Absolutely. Completely. There was no way forward with the positioning that Cadillac had, because nobody wants a couch potato [car] any longer. Everybody wants good-looking and good-driving cars that have a certain responsiveness, and that aren’t arousing the sensation that you are sitting on a cushion.
There is no denying Cadillac needed to change, and I think this territory that the Germans left and we are just about to conquer is very promising because of the ubiquity of the Germans in suburbia. And I think the more cars they sell, the more people will think twice if they want the same brand that a third of the neighborhood already has. That’s why I think the best time for Cadillac is yet to come.
But we also learned on the sales front that our cars need to earn their way in. Because we haven’t made performance-oriented cars in the past, they are smaller than Cadillacs used to be, they have this new design line that is still distinctive, but is no longer as bulky or massive, people need to get their heads around it, and see that this [Ellinghaus points at the newly unveiled ATS-V nearby] is the new Cadillac.
What about the Escalade?
The Escalade is a terrific car, and I love it to pieces. It is an icon. But it’s not the pinnacle of Cadillac. Yes, in terms of the price point, but not in terms of image, the car that people aspire to. It is simply a little too polarizing to do this job. You either love SUVs or you hate SUVs. So I think from a product point of view, we need nothing more than a top-of-the-range sedan to show that our aspirations are not ending with the CTS here. And of course the CT6 that we already announced will do this job. SUVs resonate more naturally with the brand perception of Cadillac, whereas people still need to understand that when it comes to sedans, [there is a] new Cadillac. It takes time.
What makes the CT6 the flagship for Cadillac?
Dimensionally, it’s a significantly bigger car than the CTS, but the great thing about it is that due to lightweight technologies that our engineers use, the weight of this car is about the same weight as a CTS. Just imagine a car that has the driving characteristic of a 5 Series but the dimensions of a 7 Series. That is what the CT6 will be.
Who is your ideal Cadillac customer?
I don’t care. I want the brand to appeal to everybody who likes the values, appreciates the products, and has the means to buy them. You do not gain appreciation by overtly signaling who you appeal to. So I absolutely struggle with any segmentation of our customers, saying to me “your ideal customer is Mr. X, 35 years old, living there, having this hobby and this job.” Forget it. You simply need to like it, and of course in luxury you need to have the financial means to buy it.
I also don’t buy that younger customers are by definition better than older customers. Because age and wealth correlate highly—too bad for us younger people. And I want to appeal to young customers, but I don’t want to lose our old customers. I have no issue with the average age of an XTS customer because they stay healthy, they have the means, and they keep buying cars. And it makes money! So who am I to say, “no, we need to focus on a certain target customer”?
How do you change Cadillac significantly without alienating legacy customers?
We do alienate some customers. But to a certain extent you cannot have it all. And we must simply accept that we are currently in a situation—and it explains our sales results in the U.S.—that we lose our previous customers because they, to a certain extent, wonder why Cadillac has changed direction. And as much as they like the cars they are driving, they realize how different the new cars are.
And if you take the CTS as an example, not all but some [previous CTS buyers] cannot make the price walk to the new CTS, which is about $8000 more. But do we want to be a luxury brand at eye-level with BMW, Mercedes, and Audi? If so, we simply need to accept that we will lose customers on our way. Once we conquer more customers who like the new Cadillac, who cares about those that have left the brand? I am very optimistic that, over time, people will get their heads around that this is the new Cadillac, not just the cold, soulless, sterile German perfection.
You’ve said before that you want Cadillac to be proudly American, yet you were not a fan of how the controversial “Poolside” commercial portrayed that identity. [Note: While this commercial aired after Ellinghaus took over as CMO, the decision to run it predated him.] How do you emphasize Cadillac’s American roots without rehashing “Poolside”?
“Poolside” will not see a repetition, for sure. We will not poke at other nations. That’s not the way forward in building a global brand. What I do want to keep, though, is the point of view. Whether you liked “Poolside” or not, it had a point of view. I want distinctive communication. I do not want car porn. I do not want to just show beautiful product shots of cars. I want to capture people’s imaginations. I always say, I want to build the first luxury brand that just happens to sell cars. Luxury brands don’t sell products, they sell dreams.
How will I deal with the Americana? I will not use the words “American Luxury” anymore. What is the difference to European luxury? It’s not meaningful, and if you need to say that you are luxury, you are not luxury. Only the worst real-estate people that need to get rid of totally shabby rental flats put signs out that say “luxury rental.” That’s about where luxury ended as a word.
What I think is universal in its appeal is the American spirit. This optimism. This belief that the future is better than the past. And that has appeal in China as well as in Europe. So we will have American backdrops that are recognizable as American in our communications, but we will avoid clichés. So no Route 66. Don’t expect an Empire State Building.
Yet the new alphanumeric naming convention seems so European, so German.
Yes, I know, I know, and everybody is accusing me of lip service when I say we are not German and that’s a good thing, and how I want to reinforce the Americana. But honestly it is not [lip service]. My issue is that we need to give our cars proper mental places in our own hierarchy and across the competition. And ATS, CTS, XTS, you need to be in the car industry to figure out where they are size-wise. When you say A4, A6, A8, 3 Series, 5 Series, 7 Series, you immediately realize. My argument is simple: BMW, Audi, Mercedes have a clearer nomenclature than we do. Many others as well. We need to play within the laws of the brands that make 80 percent of the volume of luxury cars. And our customers come to our showrooms and—whether we like it or not—they say stupid things like, “Cadillac, what’s your 5 Series? Cadillac, what’s your A4?” Hierarchy is not a German invention, they just adhere better to it.
But you have such a rich history of evocative names—Seville, DeVille, Eldorado...
Yes, DeVille was far more exciting, Eldorado was far more exciting. But I don’t want nameplates to be exciting, because I want to build a Cadillac brand. The brand must be the driver of passion, and the cars and nomenclature should just sort themselves out. So I take all the blame—oh boy, and I have tons of it, on my desk, on all the blogs—and I fully accept it, but there’s no way around it. Don’t forget, we will expand our product portfolio, and if we keep the three letters, we will definitely confuse customers.
So I know [the nomenclature] sounds German, although it isn’t—it’s just logical and hierarchical. People outside of car nuts and automotive journalists have a hard time memorizing all the names Cadillac used in the past anyway. They are no longer meaningful. Let’s face it, those cars weren’t anywhere near as good as today’s cars are, so those names are not arousing for those that still remember them.
Among luxury brands, who else is doing the kind of branding you want for Cadillac?
I will deliberately shy away from the example that everybody gives in this case: “Everybody wants to be Apple.” No. We want to remain Cadillac. But Apple teaches us one thing: The convergence of design and technology. And that’s something that’s highly relevant for Cadillac. Expect our future appearance to be, let’s say, more human than the Germans are—light, a look and feel that is definitely contemporary American. There is a cool America out there, and this is what I want.
