The Challenge

• Spend vs. Revenue Gap: GM spent more on U.S. advertising than any major competitor, yet it trailed both Ford and Toyota in revenue. Our team set out to find out why that budget wasn’t paying off.
• Brand Imbalance: GM runs four core brands (Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC), and we suspected advertising attention was heavily skewed toward Chevrolet.
• Measuring Awareness Directly: Spending data alone couldn’t show how consumers actually perceived GM’s brands, so we needed primary data to measure awareness brand by brand.

The Strategy

• Survey Design & Analysis: I designed the survey in Google Forms and analyzed 30 responses in Google Sheets, measuring brand awareness, portfolio knowledge and ad exposure for each of GM’s four brands.
• Competitive Benchmarking: I pulled five years of advertising spend and revenue data from Statista and calculated GM’s average annual U.S. ad spend at $2.85B, compared with Toyota at $1.49B and Ford at $1.98B.
• Cross-Checking with Secondary Data: I compared survey results against market share data from IBISWorld and social media audience size, finding the same Chevrolet-heavy imbalance across YouTube, Instagram, X, and TikTok.
• Report Authorship: I wrote 5 of the report’s 9 sections, including the executive summary, survey findings, ad spend analysis, current strategy review, and conclusion, within a five-person team.