Volvo sells it’s soul for sexy!
When I read this story about the re-branding of the Volvo logo, my nostrils flared and I screamed out a vulgarity that’s probably best not repeated, even on the Internet.
Volvo hopes the C30 will rid it of its traditional association as a safe choice of family car and make it appeal to a younger and broader audience.
There are two major problems I see with this strategy. First, as Tom Peters has wrote about at length, the world is getting older, not younger. Volvo says it want’s to expand it’s audience, but what it really needs is to grow. The aging population plays exactly into Volvo’s current position with an attribute that is highly regarded among the older set. Secondly safety isn’t something you can just go back to if the other thing doesn’t work.
In trying to attract a younger audience, Volvo will not only need to discard their reputation of safety, they will need to destroy it. As long as there is an “essence” of safety to the brand, they will lack a certain sex appeal, and have only modest appeal to that “younger” audience. Danger is sexy, and Volvo is neither. The company will have to do a great amount of work to fit into an already crowded space marketing to an increasingly smaller audience at the expense of their already solid reputation.
If you are the high-water mark for something as hard to capture as safety, which implies a great deal of trust and respect for your brand, you shouldn’t abandon it so quickly. Sexy is great, if you have nothing else going for you, but Volvo doesn’t need sexy to grow thier market. They are already positioned exactly where they need to be to exploit the biggest demographic shift the world has ever seen.