General Motors is leveraging its corporate brand – complete with a new “Everybody In” campaign and redesigned logo – as the automaker ramps up its focus on electric vehicles (EVs).

The firm’s new logo insignia nods to EVs by using “electric” blue and making the “m” look like an electrical plug, while the “Everybody In” campaign deploys a range of celebrities (such as author Malcolm Gladwell and surfer Bethany Hamilton) to highlight the Ultium batteries which power all EVs made by GM brands, such as Cadillac and Chevrolet.


General Motors’ old logo (left) and new logo (right)


Why it matters

Corporate brands often live quietly in the background, especially when an organisation is a house of brands. However, they can effectively be used to demonstrate company-wide capabilities and exert a favourable “halo” effect for individual brands.

Takeaways

  • A corporate brand can help demonstrate an overarching goal or set of principles, which can then be adapted by individual brands in distinct ways.
  • Corporate campaigns can pursue high-level educational or informational goals, and thus leave individual brands with the task of fueling demand.

Find out more

GM is showing off its tech credentials at the virtual CES conference this week. That includes a keynote from Mary Barra, the company’s CEO, which can be viewed by CES registrants from 8am to 9am CT/9am to 10am EST today (Tuesday, January 12th).

The company is also hosting free-to-access sessions at its Inflection Point Lounge, including a session today on “Inflection Point Change Agents”, featuring speakers from GM, Activision Blizzard and WWE (12pm to 12:20pm CT/1pm to 1:20pm EST), and “Entertainment Transformed”, with executives from GM and The Springhill Company (available from 10:30 CT/11:30 ET), tomorrow (Wednesday, January 13th).

Sourced from WARC