A green GM logo won’t bring in the green

gm-green-logoIt’s been reported in several media over the past week or two that GM is considering changing its logo to green to reflect a leaner, more environmentally conscious identity.

I can’t think of anything less meaningful to the company or its customers.

GM’s future has nothing to do with telling the world that it’s lean and green — which is what the new logo color is supposed to represent. The only thing that matters is whether the  public comes to perceive that GM and its products reflect the right values.

Honda and Toyota do well in the U.S. (and most places) because, to a vast number of people, their brands have come to represent cars that are among the easiest and most enjoyable to own: affordable, reliable, durable and neither too ugly nor too fancy. People didn’t come to feel that way because Toyota and Honda continually told us that their cars were just right (even though they DO continuously tell us). People came to feel that way because their experience was consistent with all the wonderful things Toyota and Honda always say about themselves.

GM would argue that it’s making cars with these same wonderful attributes. Whether that’s true is irrelevant. What matters is whether people perceive that it’s true.

Further, it’s not enough for people to agree when GM says it. People have to assign these attributes to GM products without any prompting before GM can regain its role as a leader in the global auto industry. That’s what branding is all about. And it takes years — not just years of marketing, but years of consistency in what you promise and what you deliver. Today, GM is still too close to the Hummer for anyone to really believe that it cares a lick about lean and about that kind of green.

GM may engineer a financial recovery over the next couple years, and that will be a great thing. But it’s going to take far longer than that for people to  know, in their bones, that GM stands for lean and green — if, in fact, that’s really what GM wants for the long haul.

And I don’t even think that’s the right message. Because in 15 years, green is going to be the price of entry in the car business; if your products aren’t environmentally responsible, then you won’t thrive. So is GM going to rebuild its very identity around meeting the next generation’s minimum standards?

Do Honda and Toyota really get respect for the energy efficiency of their fleets? Or do they get respect for pursuing a mission — building cars that people want to own — with so much focus that energy efficiency naturally became a part of it at the right time? Their fleets were energy efficient before the 2008 run-up in gas prices. The only thing that changed was the advertising.

If the new GM is smarter than the old GM, it will focus on the reasons people really buy cars — the perfect combination of price, style, durability, maintainability and lifetime affordability. Green fits in there for sure. But it won’t always be the headline. And even today, I doubt it’s the reason most people choose which car to buy.

Facebook: eyeballs, China and deja vu

Is it possible to have two deja vus at the same time? Or is that simply schizophrenia?

According to Venturebeat, Facebook is raising money to buy back stock from its employees. It hopes to borrow $150 million to buy back 15 million shares at $10 each. These shares have been given to employees of the private company xiaonei-blueover the past few years, and those employees have the right to sell up to 20% of their holdings, according to the article.

And now that the market for IPOs is so rotten, this is apparently the only way the company can help them cash in anytime soon.

That’s where the first case of deja vu comes in. Just 10 years ago, during the first Internet boom, people couldn’t cash in quickly enough on their foundation-free stock. Yes, Facebook has an astounding number of users, but I’m not so sure about its business plan. The company will undoubtedly go public some day, but I simply don’t believe it’s monetizable to the same extent as Amazon, eBay and Google.

Facebook really has only one asset: a bigazillion eyeballs. Which is impressive in itself, and there ought to be a way to make money from it. But with ad markets drying up and Facebook’s genuine incompetence when it comes to figuring out how to let businesses participate in a way justifies their spending money,  I don’t know what the company is going to do to pay back this next $150 million that it borrows — let alone the previous $460 million it’s raised, according to PaidContent.org.

Facebook is undoubtedly an 800-pound gorilla in the white-hot social networking arena. But there were  scores of 800-pound gorillas a decade ago, whose names I can no longer recall, that went bust because they couldn’t figure out how to turn eyeballs into cash.

I’m not predicting Facebook is going to go under anytime soon. In fact, I’m sure it will be around to cash in on an improved IPO market sometime next year. But if I were an employee and could get $10 a share for stock that I hadn’t paid for, I would sell as much as I was allowed at the first possible moment.

Here’s another deja vu-inducing part of the story: Facebook can’t get the money from its usual investors, so according to the reports already cited above, some portion of the money is coming from Asia. I remember when Japanese investors bought (and overpaid for) Rockefeller Center in the late ’80s. At the time, it was assumed to be a disheartening sign that U.S. economic dominance was ending.

It’s clear to me that, no matter how strong and innovative the U.S. may be, the world is becoming a more competitive place; any perception that we are falling probably has more to do with the fact that others are rising. Still, do we need to make it easy for them?

It’s always bothered me when people complain that we’re losing our mojo as a world power, but they don’t seem to make a conneciton between that observation and our willingness to let Asia — China in particular — lend us the money to finance our foreign wars and deficit spending.

If China comes to own a third or more of Facebook, do you think these people will notice? Do you think they’ll care?