Caddy Shack

case study

CADDY SHACK

Cadillac hits the road with an immersive experience that drives the brand out of a ditch, speeding past its goal by 700 percent. By Charles Pappas

ROAD SHOW

Exhibitor: Cadillac
Show: Cadillac ELECTRIQ Theater
Budget: Over $1 million
Challenge:
Sell the luxury-car-buying demographic on the company's all new fleet of electric vehicles.
Solution:
Design a road show that visits events known to appeal to its target audience. Create an immersive experience connecting Cadillac's storied past and its electric future.
Result:
Achieved seven times is initial goal of 2-percent increase in the number of attendees who felt Cadillac is “the brand for me.”

The Cadillac brand is 122 years old — that's older than the Theory of Relativity, L.L. Bean, and sliced bread. Like any centenarian on two legs or four wheels, its longevity inspires both glances of admiration and questions about relevance. Where the division of the General Motors Co. once drove over the competition, heralded by marketing slogans such as “You Can Kill a Horse but not a Cadillac” and “It's a 'Who's Who' of the Highway!,” the brand became a metaphor for excellence itself. Products often advertised themselves as “The Cadillac of dog foods” and “The Cadillac of chainsaws” to imply an unsurpassable superiority to all other hopelessly outclassed competitors in their field. But for years now, Cadillac has suffered a flat-tire of a brand identity, many times being associated with the demographic that prefers early-bird specials, Werther's hard candies, and reruns of “Matlock.” Its decline might well have been chiseled in cultural stone when Krusty the Clown on “The Simpsons” snarkily endorsed an SUV as “the Cadillac of automobiles.”

So, at the beginning of 2022 when the automaker announced its move to an all-electric fleet with the launch of the new Lyriq and other models — what it hoped would be perceived as a gleaming example of innovation and style — Cadillac knew skeptical consumers were not likely to automatically imagine themselves cruising down the open road in one. “We lacked brand relevance,” says Mary Trybus, SVP and group creative director for Jack Morton Worldwide Inc., Cadillac's experiential marketing agency. Data backs up that unflinching assertion. In the early part of the year, when the company asked consumers if Cadillac was “the brand for me,” it found the car ranked 43 percent lower than leading competitors and it wasn't even recognized as a contender among those who purchase electric vehicles. Driving home that gloomy statistic was a J.D. Power 2021 U.S. Automotive Performance, Execution and Layout (APEAL) Study that ranked Tesla the highest among luxury brands, just beating out Porsche, and with Cadillac barely noticeable in the rearview mirror. Another study that charted people's top three dream cars found that models from BMW, Tesla, and Mercedes-Benz, along with the Chevrolet Corvette and the Ford Mustang, were what drivers aspired to more than any other model. If this were a horse race, Cadillac would be destined for the glue factory.

Guests lined up outside the 50-by-60-foot cube, dubbed the Cadillac ELECTRIQ Theater, whose exterior seemed alive with kinetic animation.

Making a U-Turn
Through the years, the Cadillac name has been synonymous not only with quality but also with innovations that changed the automotive world, from the thermostatically controlled carburetor and emission control to a closed cooling system and electronic fuel injection. But those past glories may as well have been nothing more than a new-and-improved axle on a horse and buggy when it came to electric vehicles. To gain traction in a world of Teslas and Audis, the automotive icon knew it needed to connect emotionally with its core target demographic: those aged 38 to 48, highly educated, with a typical household income of more than $300,000. Psychologically, they view themselves as living life on their own terms. They value optimism and desire a sense of purpose. Their lifestyle interests veer sharply toward tennis and golf, with regular attendance at these sporting events. They are also highly attracted to technology and tech-based experiences. While the last might suggest they eschew anything that doesn't take place on a screen, their regular attendance at these sporting events says otherwise.

Shifting Gears
Working with Jack Morton Worldwide, the company devised a strategy of piggybacking on events it knew its target audience favored — e.g., the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open — with an immersive experience in an enclosed exhibit, similar to highly popular traveling entertainment such as “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” and “Titanic: The Exhibition” that submerge visitors in virtual worlds. This approach was the equivalent of a car with an efficient miles-per-gallon rating: Going to where hundreds of thousands of its potential consumers would be, and employing a high-tech experience that would appeal to their known likes but also subliminally suggest Cadillac was technologically sophisticated. It could wield the power of face-to-face marketing and more effectively ingratiate the brand with visitors by isolating them in an environment where it controlled the message without distractions for longer than print-, TV-, or web-based ads could. Calling it the Cadillac ELECTRIQ Theater, the experience would meld art and technology to tell what it hoped would be a bold, inspiring brand story about the automaker's sparkling past and radiant future as it transitioned from greenhouse-gas-spewing internal combustion engines to earth-friendly electric ones. The company hoped this would resonate with luxury consumers on multiple levels and produce one of the most dramatic collective brand lifts in Cadillac history. Still, its goals for the tour were as modest as a used Yugo: achieve a general growth in attendees' opinion of the brand and their willingness to consider purchasing a Cadillac. On a more precise goal, it hoped for a 2-percent increase, from 24 to 26 percent, in the number who would agree that Cadillac is “the brand for me.”

Using a pulsed entrance, Cadillac's staff of five let in 10 to 12 participants at a time, where they stepped into a fantastic interior.

The company handpicked seven events where the ELECTRIQ Theater would appear, with a schedule of stops stretching from 2022 into 2023. The roadshow's itinerary included the Miami Open, U.S. Open, and PGA Championship. There would also be stops at the North American International Auto Show for obvious reasons, and The Americana at Brand, the last a massive shopping, dining, entertainment, and residential complex in Glendale, CA, with upscale retailers such as Nordstrom.

The company handpicked seven events where the ELECTRIQ Theater would appear, with a schedule stretching from 2022 well into 2023.

In addition to dovetailing with its audience's preferences, the events offered a Pacific-size pool of potential customers. The U.S. Open, for one, drew 888,000 fans, while the PGA Championship pulled in almost 225,000 enthusiasts. For the sake of comparison, the U.S. Open drew almost three times the attendance of the country's biggest car show, the Chicago Auto Show, while the PGA Championship witnessed roughly twice the number of people who attended the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show.

A total of eight high-definition projectors projection-mapped the dreamy imagery on three walls and the floor, creating an illusion at times of a space whose inside was impossibly larger than its outside.

Riding Shotgun
The first known car advertisement, which was for the Winton Motor Carriage Co., ran in an 1898 issue of “Scientific American,” with a call-to-action headline of “Dispense with the Horse.” More recently, though, cars have been marketed by appealing to less practical and more emotional persuasion. From Toyota's “Oh, what a feeling” to Jeep's “Have fun out there,” successful car-selling campaigns create what marketers refer to as “lovemarks,” using a combination of empathy-driven and value-based themes touching on what a given demographic truly cares about. To create its own indelible lovemark, Cadillac had, again, set the tour in venues offering entertainment that was deeply ingrained into its audience's persona. Part of its strategy was to piggyback on the events themselves. Cadillac let the event partners do the heavy promotional lifting for the upcoming events, likely counting on a kind of halo effect that would extend from the competition and their promoters to suggest a vibrant connection between the glamorous athletics and the luxury car. For example, the Miami Open promoted the Cadillac ELECTRIQ Theater on the professional tennis tournament's website, detailing in emails to event ticketholders what to expect when they arrived, within event apps, and in social-media posts made throughout the competition. The other events bolstered the tour in a similar fashion. The carmaker also leveraged a variety of high-profile brand ambassadors in tennis and golf to bolster the experience on their various social-media platforms. Frances Tiafoe — who has ranked as high as the number-10 best singles tennis player in the world — promoted the Cadillac event before the U.S. Open tennis match to his nearly 740,000 followers on Instagram. Likewise, Tony Finau, who was once ranked the ninth-best professional golfer in the world, expertly steered his 600,000-plus fans on Instagram to the Cadillac appearance that took place at the PGA Championship.

For seven minutes, attendees enjoyed a blend of archival images and mood-altering lights extolling Cadillac's past and suggesting its glowing future.

Road Trip
Like a car remotely heated on a chilly winter morning, Cadillac was warmed up for its audience before it even got going. When the tour set up at the Miami Open, visitors rubbernecked when they glimpsed a 50-by-60-foot cube that seemed alive. Around the exterior of the 15-foot-high structure was a sky scene that transformed itself based on the time of day, its languorous virtual sunrise-to-sunset scenery mirroring that of the real world. Alluring and a little bit surreal, the structure was no easier to ignore than the high beams of an oncoming car at night. When bedazzled onlookers came closer, they encountered signage that clearly explained the mysterious room's mission in terms as simple as a Model T: “ELECTRIQ THEATER,” the signs read, “an all-new immersive experience that transports you into the iconic world of Cadillac and its all-electric future.” Now knowing what it was, they could register via QR codes featured on signs positioned at the beginning of the queue to enter the theater. While the registration was purely voluntary — everyone was let in, whether they signed up via QR code or not — accessing the QR code offered guests a $20 gift card to use at local merchants and restaurants. Registration also allowed Cadillac to capture the participants' contact and demographic information, as well as survey their perception of the brand before and after they visited the theater.

Soon the sky scenes gave way to a prerecorded voice that, much like an attraction at Disneyland, played just prior to the theater doors opening. “Get ready to enter the iconic world of Cadillac,” the voiceover alerted the attendees when the experience was about to start. “Inspired by the magic of our legacy, we're pioneering an all-electric future,” it announced, saying they would soon be “immersed in extraordinary worlds inspired by our electrifying Lyriq, Celestiq, as well as the first-ever all-electric Escalade.”

Using a pulsed entrance, the staff of five allowed 10 to 12 participants inside at a time, where they stepped into a dreamlike interior with eight high-definition projectors projectionmapping imagery on three walls and the floor (one wall was mirrored to effect the illusion of an even larger space). For the next seven minutes, attendees experienced a pleasantly disorienting whirl of sound and imagery — multicolored psychedelic lights like something you'd find at a trancehop concert, and a sense of floating between galactic nebulae, while a century's worth of archival images flashed on the theater walls, the visuals of the past vehicles alternating with images of the future EVs. The projectors' sonic counterparts, eight speakers and one subwoofer, cocooned the theater in a sensuous cushion of sound. Visitors by the score used the mirrored wall to take selfies and post them on social media, giving the event a range outside its immediate location any EV would envy.

Overall, 38 percent of attendees said that Cadillac is “the brand for me.”

Much as cars themselves improve year to year, adding complex new technology such as automatic transmission and air conditioning, and more recently, collision sensors and self-driving capabilities, Cadillac kept adding sophisticated new features as the tour rolled along. In 2023, using Azure Kinect cameras and Notch, a real-time graphics engine, it began tracking visitors the moment they stepped inside the theater. The cameras and software generated “portals” — whirlpools of lights swirling around guests' feet as they moved around the theater. Later, Cadillac enhanced the portals even more by tracking full body movement and generating digital reflections of attendees on the theater walls, virtual doppelgangers that shimmered like a hybrid vehicle of Klimt paintings and fireflies. When the visitors exited, they completed a post-event survey and received a thank-you along with a gift card from Cadillac.

When the tour came to a stop, Cadillac looked to see what kind of mileage it had gotten out of it. Set on achieving an overall increase in the audiences' opinion of the brand and willingness to consider buying a Cadillac, the company realized gains of 17 percent and 11 percent, respectively. More impressive were the results for its chief goal, a 2-percent improvement in those who would concur that Cadillac is “The brand for me.” Fully 38 percent of those who experienced The Cadillac ELECTRIQ Theater emerged from it feeling that way, exceeding the automaker's goal for an increase by 700 percent. In some ways, the anecdotes from participants provided as much proof of success as the statistics: “It's cooler than I thought,” said one visitor. “Not my parent's Caddy.” Another attendee noted, “[It was] like a Disney World show.” But the most bottom-line-enhancing comment might have been, “It really convinced me to buy from this brand.” Clearly, Cadillac was back in the driver's seat. E

POP GOES THE CADILLAC
Even as Cadillac rolls into the 21st century, we think there's nothing wrong with celebrating the classics. Cadillac has long been an icon in American pop culture. Here are a few of our favorite moments.

CADILLAC RANCH: On the plains of the Texas panhandle, 10 vintage Cadillacs rest half buried in the dirt, nose down at a 60-degree angle. Over the years, the art installation has become a community art project, and the cars rarely go more than a few hours without new paint appearing on their skin.

PINK CADILLAC: Elvis Presley was known to love Cadillacs. His first, a 1954 Fleetwood Series 60, was pink, and it was immortalized in song and film. The original now resides in Graceland.

FURY ROAD: Proving that Cadillac can stand the test of time — perhaps even an apocalypse — a mashup of two 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Villes make an appearance in the film Mad Max. Presumably, the flamethrower was an add-on.

FREEWAY OF LOVE: Aretha Franklin had a soft spot for pink Cadillacs and one even made an appearance in her 1985 hit single, “Freeway of Love.” After the diva died, 100 pink Cadillacs lined the road as her hearse made its way to Greater Grace Temple, where her funeral took place.