Cadillac won't lean heavily on its American heritage in Australia

Cadillac figures everyone already knows it’s American, so it’s pitching itself more as a global brand rather than emphasising its origins.

“We’re not even really leaning into American,” Melissa Grady-Dias, Cadillac’s global chief marketing officer, told Australian and New Zealand media.

“We’re leaning into the spirit of Cadillac, versus [the spirit of] America.”

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Cadillac is launching here this year as an electric-only brand, with arguably the most iconic and most distinctly American member of its current range – the V8-powered Escalade – off the table for our market.

“We’ll definitely use [its American origins] a little bit. But what we found in the research is people only seem to know what they see in American pop culture, which is Escalade generally,” said GM International communications director Lauren Indiveri-Clarke.

“So the Lyriq for them, whether we said it was American… they haven’t seen it. They don’t know it because it’s not in pop culture for them as much.

“So… we’re not totally going away from the use of [Cadillac being American]. We’re just not leaning as heavily as they do [in the US] on that.”

That has seen the company make some changes to its advertising, though Ms Grady-Dias says the campaigns “aren’t really different”.

“We got some interesting feedback around the advertising of the US market… it resonates with Australia and New Zealand customers,” said Ms Indiveri-Clarke.

“There’s a few phrases and terms, like that whole thing around the American part of it just doesn’t resonate the same.

“In the [Australian and New Zealand] markets, we’ve actually kind of taken that out of some of the marketing and the advertising and made it a little bit more global in the language that we’re using.

“We’re really presenting [Cadillac] more as a global brand.”

Even some word choices have been nixed. ‘Maverick’, for example, is a popular term in the US, but in Australia and New Zealand Cadillac said it just made people think of Top Gun.

The brand is instead being pitched not at ‘mavericks’ but rather ‘ambitious norm-breakers’, to better suit Australian and New Zealand vernacular.

“Our history and our heritage is something that we obviously don’t want to over-play in Australia and New Zealand because we don’t have a history there, but we have a global history to lean on and we want to make sure customers know where we’re coming from with that,” said Ms Indiveri-Clarke.

Australians are arguably more familiar with the Escalade, which was first introduced for model year 1999, than any other Cadillac apart from DeVille, Eldorado and Fleetwood luxo-barges of yore.

During the 21st century, however, the Cadillac brand has been through an extended transformation.

It introduced the aggressively styled, rear-wheel drive CTS in 2002, joined in 2004 by the V8-powered CTS-V that was the first model in the V-Series performance sub-brand.

The first-generation CTS was the first in a long line of American-made sports sedans that continues with today’s CT4 and CT5, both of which are available in hot V and even hotter V Blackwing models… the latter of which even offer the now rare option of a six-speed manual.

The brand also phased out more traditionally Cadillac models like the DeVille/DTS.

While Cadillac has offered various sport sedans and V-Series models over the past two decades – and even a Corvette-based roadster called the XLR – it’s now embarking on a journey to a fully electric lineup by 2030.

It has, however, left the door open for combustion-powered vehicles to continue beyond then if there’s customer demand.

For Australia, Cadillac says it only has plans to introduce EVs. The Lyriq is the first electric Cadillac, serving as the luxury brand’s rival to the likes of the BMW iX. It’ll headline the brand’s launch in Australia later this year.

Subsequently, Cadillac revealed the smaller Optiq and the larger, three-row Vistiq, as well as an electric counterpart to the Escalade called the Escalade iQ.

It has yet to confirm these models for our market, though all their names have been trademarked with IP Australia. Cadillac has also teased product announcements will come during 2025.

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