Lincoln, the brand innovator?

Last week, while working on a pitch, a colleague forwarded a surprising article she’d found that day. The article’s title, Ride Time: Lincoln Expands Chauffeur Services to Second Market, caused me to do a double take. Lincoln, the car company that was historically associated with limo services was not one that normally comes to mind when you think “innovation.” Sure, the company has rolled out a series of solid, albeit niche, vehicles, but when you think of cars that signal that you’ve arrived in life, a Lincoln somehow doesn't rise to the top of the list. But, maybe it should be on the radar of businesses looking to adapt to changing landscapes, to new competitors, and to ever-evolving consumers.

When you think of cars that signal that you’ve arrived in life, a Lincoln somehow doesn't rise to the top of the list

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It turns out that Lincoln’s program – one in which a chauffeur will drive you in your Lincoln car or SUV to your event or destination, take care of refueling or cleaning your car and basically allow Lincoln owners to experience the lifestyle to which they seek to become accustomed – isn’t the first or only effort by Lincoln to move beyond what it has been. Recognizing the changing tastes of consumers, the need to differentiate from its stablemate, Ford, and competitive pressure from more upscale brands, Lincoln has made “extra-vehicle” service offerings a core part of the brand's DNA. 

Lincoln has made “extra-vehicle” service offerings a core part of the brand's dna. 

Other offers address conversion (Lincoln Date Night extended test drives), the actual ownership experience (pick-up and drop-off service for maintenance), and a host of others that make buying a Lincoln more than buying a car...it’s buying into a brand-aligned lifestyle. Marketing might drive a sale, but it doesn’t drive the kind of loyalty and commitment that the car industry – and others like it – depend on. With brand president, Kumar Galhotra, insisting that teams think about services before they start designing a vehicle, Lincoln is redefining the role that it plays in the lives of its customers to better fit with how they live today and will live tomorrow.

And that’s exactly why Lincoln shows a path forward for so many brands. How many CMOs or global brand directors want to get people across their organizations to think of brand as more than the domain of marketing, but as something that helps everyone do their job better? Lots. How many actually succeed at it? Very few. It doesn't matter if you're talking to a global enterprise software company, a century-and-a-quarter old industrial conglomerate or a Silicon Valley startup, in the back of each of their minds is the question of how to use brand to drive the business, not just drive marketing.

In the back of the minds of brand leaders is the question of how to use brand to drive the business, not just drive marketing.

What does it take to get there? Two things:

1) Brands need to understand where their consumers are going.
Understanding the key ways in which consumers will be changing and the things they will care about most in the future should play a more important role than what matters now. This will mean developing consumer intelligence systems that go beyond a Google News alerts, Wired articles and tweets from self-proclaimed futurists. Developing real insight requires real research, and that’s hard, but it’s worth it.

2) Marketers need to treat their non-marketing colleagues like an audience.
The tools we rely on to put brand to work – the guidelines, visual systems, messaging maps – need to be broadened. Brand needs to flex to fit the diverse needs of the diverse people who should be using it as rubric for shaping key decisions. The communications-centric brand frameworks that have been developed for decades need to be expanded to become experience-centric ones. The focus of brand training needs to have more experience design, less graphic design. And, most importantly, the experts and keepers of the brand need to get used to the idea that they have a lot to learn on the topic. They need to start being as curious about how brand can be used in the product, service and innovation-design processes as they are about their consumers.

When companies take these two steps, they build an environment that is better informed and better equipped to rethink how to serve customers. One in which, for all the varied ideas and programs that get developed, for all the new services, innovative features and outside-the-box thinking that is devised, brand goes from being a driver of campaigns to the common framework to keep everything aligned around the consumer. That’s the lesson of Kumar Galhotra’s Lincoln, and it's one worth learning.