MG’s electric renaissance shows the tenacity of a strong brand

Lucian Camp is a financial services brand consultant, copywriter, author and blogger. He co-presents the On The Other Hand podcast.

I don’t know about you, but travelling around on London’s roads these days I see more and more bland and anonymous electrically-powered SUVs that I don’t recognise.  And if I look at any of them more closely, I see (and then immediately forget) the name of a Chinese electric car manufacturer that I don’t recognise either – BYD, Omoda, Jaecoo, NIO.

But there is an exception.  There’s one brand that I do recognise and remember, and that says something – quite a few things, actually – about the cars that carry it.  That brand is MG.

MG has of course a long history as the definitive British mid-market sports car brand, a field that it dominated for 50 years or more.  My wife was a passionate MG enthusiast, owning at various times three Midgets (the last a present from her loving husband after I sold my agency) and two MGBs.  But despite Judy’s support, like most of the rest of the British car industry MG hit hard times and went bust.  The last “original” MG came off the production line in 2005.

Five years later, the Chinese firm Nanjing Motor (subsequently merged into the giant SAIC Group) bought the brand.  Within a couple of years they started attaching it to their cars, with its eight-sided logo wisely unchanged.  And for the last six years, it’s been by some distance China’s largest single-brand car exporter, selling some 88% of its production outside its home market.

Being a fairly unreformed petrolhead (or should that be batteryhead these days?) I know perfectly well that today’s Chinese MG brand has absolutely nothing at all in common with the British MG band that commenced production in Abingdon in 1924.  There is no connection, no strand of DNA, no shared heritage, that links the two.  And yet the truth is that those dull, small, electric SUVs carrying the MG badge have a resonance for me that the ones called BYD and NIO simply don’t.  The name, and the eight-sided logo, bring layers of meaning that the other brands completely lack.

Unless I’m unique in all this, it’s a perfect demonstration not only of the value of brands, but also of their remarkably straightforward transferability.  And that makes me think about revisiting an idea I first developed twenty or thirty years ago, when the process of consolidation in financial services started gathering pace.

My idea was to launch a financial services brand brokerage, intermediating between companies acquiring and merging other firms and ending up with armfuls of brands they really didn’t have any use for, and younger, smaller, simpler firms, mostly digital, that needed to build awareness, trust and credibility as quickly and cheaply as possible.

On my brokerage’s shelves, there’d be some premium brands that wouldn’t come cheap.   Save & Prosper, for example, is a terrific brand for a D2C savings and investments business, owned by JPMorgan since they picked it up as part of their acquisition of Flemings.  Research shows that all those Scottish life and pensions brands – Provident, Mutual, Amicable, Life – own perceived values of shrewdness and prudence that come from the connection with those canny folk north of the border.  Even in banking, there are vanished brands like Williams & Glyns, Martins, Charterhouse, Samuel Montagu that could begin new lives underpinning weakly-capitalised online banks with no consumer awareness.

It’s true that in the minds of industry experts, quite a few of these brands were fairly tarnished by the time they disappeared from view.  Some would argue that brands like Northern Rock, Equitable Life and indeed Allied Dunbar might do more harm than good.  They probably wouldn’t attract super-premium prices.

But then again, the MG brand was pretty badly damaged by its experiences in its later life – being attached to rubbish cars like the badge-engineered MG Metro, Maestro and Montego, before very publicly going out of business altogether.  And none of that seems to have troubled the buyers of those bland, small electric vehicles.