Nice going GM.

Destroying Pontiac and Oldsmobile, once iconic brands on the American landscape, and Saturn, a fresh idea with lots of potential, weren’t enough. Now it seems due to your utterly irresponsible management of Saab, it too is being scrapped. So utterly valueless have you made it, GM, that you can’t even sell it to the lowest bidder. Now you are forced to take it out behind the barn and shoot it.

Remember when Saab was cool? It was a car you noticed and got you noticed. People who drove them were cool. We all remember the kids in high school and college who drove the Saab beaters. They drove their rust and torn upholstery with pride. It was exotic, but in a confident and subdued way. It was Swedish. Those feelings were strong. They easily overcame its hard-to-maintain, expensive-to-fix reputation. Saabs weren’t for everyone.

Then GM bought it and it quickly morphed into every other car, both in design and the image it promised its owners. Nice.

GM only has two iconic brands left: Corvette and Cadillac. Somehow they have survived relatively in tact (although I know a few Corvette fans who would argue, quite adamantly, to the contrary). Bets on how long GM will take to bury them too?

Anyone who’s ever been deeply involved in the freight transportation industry knows that it’s not only about tractors and trailers. Whereas that is where, excuse the expression, the rubber meets the road, a lot of creativity - in all its manifestations - is involved in the process of getting freight from point A to point B to customers’ satisfaction. Engineering, industrial design and, yes, marketing, are all part of the equation.

Con-way Freight used a bit of all these things to create TrueLTL, a new way of thinking about the way companies ship heavy freight. TrueLTL is game-changing. Not only does the service dramatically reduce shipping costs for heavier freight, it also reduces waste (meaning not-so-full trucks), which is good for everyone. TrueLTL represents a fundamental rethinking of the core assumptions the industry has been working under for decades.

And like all revolutionary things, there’s a blog dedicated to it. And like all good blogs, it includes new, interesting and entertaining ways to discuss the topic at hand, in this case trucking. In it you will read references to ketchup, Federalism, summer camp, kiwi and clown cars, to name a few. (Reminder to readers: this is a blog about freight transportation!) And why not?? Con-way Freight, appropriately, is amping the dialogue in the industry. It’s learning to talk to, and sell customers in innovative ways. And that’s how you win.

So in that spirit, here’s the latest TrueLTL blog posting. Think Bon Jovi. If you don’t feel like linking over, here are the new-to-you lyrics of (You Want To) Make A Memory. Slow dancing is permitted.

Hello again, my consignee

We will be there between 1 and 3

Your shipment’s fine, and we’re on-time

And we promise no surprising fees.

—

We’ve been calling on you for a while

Have we earned your trust in this trial?

We’re working hard so we can be

The big winner in your RFP

—

If you don’t know if you should place

All of your business with Con-way Freight

You can just, leave the waste out of your network, you see

You wanna build some density.

—

I dug up this old pricing tariff

Look at all those fees we had

We didn’t want your larger freight

‘Cause we thought we couldn’t operate

—

If you say now “What’s the catch?”

If  you’re wondering “Hey, Who else will match”?

You wanna build some density.

—

You wanna drive fewer miles.

When we all collaborate you’ll see

All the waste we’ll eliminate

You wanna build some density.

—

If you don’t know if you should place

All of your business with Con-way Freight

You can just, leave the waste out of your network, you see.

You wanna build some density

—

You wanna drive fewer miles

When we all collaborate you’ll see

All the waste we’ll eliminate

You wanna build some density

—

You wanna build some density

In classic blog fashion (classic?), I’m going to blog about an article I just read that was written by someone else who was reporting on a story about something that already happened…

It’s about that unfortunate incident at a North Carolina Domino’s pizza franchise — the one that was recorded on video and posted on YouTube for the entire online world to see — and then bled into the off-line world of TV, radio, print, etc. It was unsettling to say the least and you can see it yourself on YouTube. Basically, a sandwich maker stuck a piece of cheese up his nose and then placed it on a customer’s sandwich … lots of laughter in the background. Then he faux-farted (I think) on a piece of salami for placement on said sandwich. More laughter. Definitely makes you think twice about ordering from Domino’s or any delivery food company for that matter. Disgusting.*

That said, a blogger whose post I read shortly after the whole thing came down predicted the end of the Dominoes brand — 50 years in the making, brought down in a minute. I personally think that conclusion goes too far. A bad mark on the brand, yes. Its complete demise? Not from a single video made by a couple of dumb kids at a store in North Carolina, even if it did spread like the plague on the internet.

As you’d expect, PR Week covered Domino’s now-much maligned PR response to the incident on the cover of its April 20th issue. The headline: “Crisis forces Domino’s to revamp social media plan.” The article covers Domino’s typical and very corporate crisis tactics: fire the employees, contain the story to those already aware, put out a statement…you know the drill. But, they didn’t reach out into the broader online world. They neglected the very community who were most exposed to, and at most risk from, the video (not to mention those who had accelerated the virility of it in the first place.) It wasn’t until some unbelievable amount of time after the video broke — 48 hours! — that Domino’s changed strategy (note to self: write a post about how ridiculously fast we’re expected to move these days.)

Let’s see what the folks at Domino’s might have been thinking here: brand crisis starts and grows exponentially online via social media … What to do, what do do … got it! Let’s issue a press release. Brilliant. They finally got some good advice from none other than their ad agency who evidently could no longer stand idly by and watch its client implode. The article calls out that Domino’s doesn’t have professional PR agency representation. Instead, all PR is handled in-house. They go it alone.

This brings me to my point (finally!) I am sure Domino’s has very talented PR pros inside the company. I have nothing but respect for internal PR resources. Many of our PR clients are in-house professionals who do excellent work and, so as not to throw myself under the bus, I used to have one of those internal PR departments at a really big company. But the big lesson here is this: in times of crisis (and during the good times too) use a PR firm people!!!. Internal PR pros know their employers’ businesses well and will fall on a sword to protect its reputation. This is their job. PR firms recognize hard-to-see opportunities and risk, and bring to the table points of view that internal resources sometimes can’t because they’re too close to the company. This is our job. Together, we have all angles covered. Working as a cohesive team we can generate more creative ideas, execute with more accuracy and, having seen both sides of the world myself, generate better, more meaningful results.

This is especially true during crises when internal PR departments are often too busy fighting brush fires and taking direction from (many) different people to pause and look at the situation objectively. In Domino’s case, the fact that the “classic” corporate response was, as we say, a sound only a dog could hear, was lost on everyone inside. If Domino’s had professional, third-party PR representation before the cheese-up-the-nose scandal they would have most likely: a. had a crisis communications plan in place that most certainly would have included social media outreach and, b. had a partner on whom to rely to solve complex PR problems in the heat of the flames while they manned the hoses. This works, trust me.

Conclusion: if you’re an inside marketing/PR manager who is charged with stewarding the reputation of your company and the value of your brand (one that took millions or perhaps billions of dollars to build), think seriously about searching for, and securing, a PR firm — crisis specialists or full-service — whatever fits your needs. Or, think about your life the day your brand gets devastated by a YouTube video or the night following the report on NBC Nightly News. No thank you.

* As a very serious, grown-up marketing professional I am obviously troubled by the brand crisis and vast public relations storm that ensued for Domino’s. But if I put myself in the shoes of a 17 year-old kid working late at night at a pizza place with nothing to do but make sandwiches? … ok, kinda funny. No excuse mind you (but funny). Hey, if this happened in a Farrelly Brothers movie we’d all be howling with laughter.

-Dave Goldberg

KG Partners developed a new brand for the newly merged Children’s Museum and Theater of Maine. As part of the work, a new logo was created and unveiled at its annual auction last Friday night. This was very satisfying work since it celebrates a momentous occasion for two legacy organizations, both with long and storied histories of helping to defend and preserve childhood in meaningful, creative and seriously fun ways. Combined, it’s an organization in motion. So is the logo.