Stuttgart walk - Stop #4 of my Daimler Tour

You might ask what does a walk through Stuttgart have to do with the brand values of Mercedes Benz. Actually plenty. 

Start with the geographical position of Stuttgart within Germany. It is part of Swabia which is the lower Western part of Germany. This area encompassed the northern boundaries of the Roman empire so you see and feel the influence of the Romans everywhere. We had a coffee in the courtyard of the castle pictured above. The architecture is clearly Italian renaissance left over from the Roman days. 

Walk around the city and you visit Platz after Platz after Platz not unlike when I visited Siena, Torino, Florence or Rome during previous trips to Italy. The picture above is a typical Platz and there are many more pictured below. 

Mercedes Benz employs hundreds of italian designers and they absolutely refuse to work north of the Alps so Mercedes Benz has their design studios in the Lake Cuomo area of Italy and if you have ever visited Lake Cuomo you would understand the importance designers place on working in an inspiring atmosphere.

Within a two hour drive from Stuttgart you have Italy, France, Switzerland and the northern provinces of Germany. All highly influence the values of brands originating in Stuttgart. The Italians bring a sense of fashion and understated elegance to the company. The French are romantic which obviously is another leftover from the Roman empire given that the word 'roman' is imbedded in the word 'romance'. Strasbourg, France is only a 45 minute drive from Stuttgart. The Swiss are the bankers to the world and the automotive sector is one of the sectors of the economy that is most dependent on financial leverage to survive.

But the Swiss also perfected watch making and the engineering of small precise objects which is integral to any automobile.  And the northern part of Germany is one of the most advanced industrial areas in the global economy. Industrial excellence is the backbone of the automotive sector. 

Each country influences Swabia in their own unique way and each are partly responsible for the brand values of a company like Mercedes Benz. If you close your eyes while walking through Stuttgart you could easily transport yourself to Italy, to France, to Switzerland to other provinces within Germany. This is a unique melding together of attributes into a brand based on local values.... not found in any other luxury vehicle brand anywhere in the world.

Then there is religion. Swabia is a protestant province steeped in Calvinism. This is a religion which stresses the importance and the need to work to get into the good graces of God.  So the people in the area are highly dedicated to their jobs.

I also found it interesting that there was little to no evidence of a 'blue collar' workforce even though the entire area is primarily an industrial town. The workers do not consider themselves 'blue collar' like you would find in a Detroit or in Oshawa. They consider themselves well above that status and demonstrate that in the way they dress, their entertainment, the restaurants they frequent, the types of food they eat and even their vices. For instance, smoking cigars is very common over smoking cigarettes. Cigarettes are considered too plebian and filthy while cigars are considered more elegant. Cigarettes are machine made ... cigars are hand rolled. Important values to a local Swabian.

They stress individualism in their attitudes towards society. There is a story that Hitler came to Stuttgart only once in his life and after a few minutes of speaking about collectivism someone cut the sound cords and nobody could hear him. So he left and he never came back although he was always driven around in a Mercedes Benz vehicle much to the chagrin of Daimler executives. ( Hitler never had a driver's licence and never owned or drove a vehicle. The Swabians were forced to produce goods for Hitler's army but never embraced him and his values ... indeed were the exact opposite of everything he represented ). 

This expression of individualism comes out clearly with the development of so many global brands ... not just Daimler and Mercedes Benz but companies like Robert Bosch, Hugo Boss and dozens of others all originate in this area.

This individualism is also rooted in religion. The catholics never translated the bible from Latin until modern times so people were dependent on a priest to teach them the lessons from the bible .... a very collective approach to teaching religion where you gather everyone in a church and you read the bible to them. Protestants translated the bible into many local languages and dialects and stressed the importance of people reading the bible on their own time and to interpret their own understanding of these writings which is one of the best examples of how to develop individual thinking.

Of course in order to do this one has to learn to read so for centuries local society stressed the importance of education and thus Swabia has one of the most highly educated workforces in the world. 

The area is also noted for having very high ethical and moral standards with one of the lowest divorce rates in the world. These high ethical standards are rooted in the area being a relatively poor area of the country through time. And as they say in Swabia ... "rich people don't need ethics" .... the rich people can buy their way out of ethical dilemmas, poor people can't so they have no choice but to maintain very high ethical standards or pay the consequences. 

High ethical standards also means that you listen to people and respect their point of view. This is critical to success of any vehicle company. The most successful in this industry listen to their customers and take feed back from their customers to improve their product. One of the best examples of this came with their first break through vehicle, indeed the first real automobile ... the Mercedes Benz ... launched in 1901. Otto Jelinek was a Daimler dealer at the time and gave Daimler the feedback from his local customer base that resulted in dozens of significant changes to the vehicle to make it more useable for its owners. Lower to the ground, wider wheel base, no protrusions out the side ... etc. In recognition of helping him design a product more attuned to the customer Daimler named the vehicle after Jelinek's daughter .. Mercedes. (see Mercedes Museum write up Blog #2 )

Swabians consider themselves farmers versus hunters. They see a cow as a source of milk and breeding of calves, hunters see a cow as Steak. So they focus on the longevity of their product ... producing a vehicle that will last forever. They say they are "too poor to make a low quality product" since a low quality product you have to buy over and over again. With a high quality product you buy it once and maintain it through its life. The longest lasting vehicles on the road in Canada are German products led by Porsche but also Mercedes Benz, BMW and Audi.

Even the name Stuttgart is integral to the development of the automobile which I'll write more about when I blog my trip to the Mercedes Benz museum on Sunday. The literal translation of Stuttgart is ' horse breeding place' thus the symbol of a horse you see on the city emblem.  So if you think about it they have been in the business of developing mobility for centuries rather than just the last 125 years of developing fine automobiles.

It is critical to understand that any luxury good has to be rooted in local values. The Chinese or any other country can knock off any product produced anywhere in the world but NOBODY can duplicate the local values embedded in a brand like Mercedes  Benz or any other luxury brand. And this is true of any successful brand. Make a list of the most successful brands and I'll bet you that you will be able to trace their roots to a particular locality just like I found the roots of Mercedes Benz.

So this was the purpose of my trip to Stuttgart. To learn the roots of the brand values of a company like Mercedes Benz. This is not to say that other vehicle companies do not have important brand values since most do but since Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz each were the first developers of individual mobility one can safely say that Mercedes Benz's brand values are one of the most deeply rooted of any vehicle company and may have the broadest cultural, geographic, religious grounding of any brand.

Quite impressive. Following are some of the pictures from my walk through Stuttgart.

Thank you Marcus it was well worth the trip to Stuttgart and one of the best weekends I've ever spent as an auto analyst.

Life is good .... enjoy.

Auto Guru in Europe