Aston Martin’s Brand Strategy Abomination

Once in a while, a brand strategy is announced that is so stupid, so antithetical to the principles of brand management, that it takes your breath away. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Aston Martin Cygnet.

As the picture above reveals, this is a very different kind of Aston Martin. For starters, it’s not very powerful, given its 67 horsepower engine – that’s 353 horses short of the V8 Vantage. Nor does it look like an Aston Martin.

Not surprising, really, given that it is based on a Toyota platform – and not just any Toyota. The Cygnet is based on its smallest four-seater, the iQ city car.

According to Aston Martin’s chief executive, Dr Ulrich Bez, the Cygnet will ‘apply Aston Martin design language, craftsmanship and brand values to a new segment of the market’.

Dr Bez, have you lost your mind? Toyota is a fine company, but it makes Japanese, mass-market, economy cars. You run Aston Martin – the most English, exclusive luxury brand ever to have existed.

Reports suggest you will soon be producing 5000 Cygnets a year, making it your company’s number-one production model. Your own definition of Aston Martin’s DNA is a combination of power, beauty and soul.

How can a car with a lawnmower engine, which, to me, looks like a punch in the balls, and is designed in Tokyo, possibly fit within your excellent prescription of the brand?

Can you be the same Dr Bez who, barely a year ago, said: ‘There is nothing in my five-year-plan that allows for sharing with other makers. We have our own technology and structure and our own platform. We do not have any reason to go and change’? Because last week, you said exactly the opposite when you announced that the Cygnet was ‘made possible with the support of an organization of Toyota’s stature and capability and the intelligent design and perfect city car package of the iQ’.

There are two possible explanations for the brand abomination that is the Cygnet and the 180° change in Aston Martin’s corporate strategy.

Maybe it has run the numbers for 2010 and is coming up short. The downturn in luxury-car orders, combined with the massive fixed costs associated with being a British car manufacturer, might mean that Aston Martin has to quickly find funds from more accessible line extensions.

If it really is short of cash, though, it should follow Ferrari’s strategy of licensing multiple brand extensions for products outside the automotive category. Such additions make instant cash but, unlike line extensions such as the Cygnet, do not damage the equity of a brand in its original category.

Alternatively, Aston Martin may be moving quickly to avoid new emission standards soon to be enforced by both the EU and US authorities. Car makers will soon be penalized if their average CO2 emissions exceed a certain level.

Competitors such as Ferrari (part of Fiat) and Lamborghini (part of Audi) can use their house of brands architecture to share the excessive CO2 production of their sports cars across a range of smaller, more environmentally friendly vehicles. Aston Martin’s single brand structure offers no such opportunity, but if half the cars it sold were Cygnets, with CO2 emissions of 99g/km, it could still sell its existing models, which emit four times that, without the need to develop hybrid engines.

Whether the dilemma is economic or environmental, Aston Martin cannot afford to dilute its brand and desecrate its heritage with the Cygnet. There must be another way.

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