It’s the good Samaritan needs help

One clue that an enterprise has lost its way comes when it starts “rebranding,” usually with the explanation that it’s seeking a wider audience or is identifying its actual “core discipline”—“people-moving” instead of flying airplanes, for example. As often as not, the change signals either a loss of focus or an ultimately futile chase after higher returns, even if that means getting into an entirely unrelated line of business.

General Electric is a poster-child example of this. Once a manufacturing powerhouse that by 1994 was the sixth-largest revenue generator among all U.S. companies, GE went on a diversification spree that created an increasingly complex and unwieldy behemoth. The transformation was led by chief executive Jack Welch, who from 1981 to 2001 closed factories, laid off workers and instead diversified into financial services, all to sycophantic praise from the Wall Street crowd. Instead of making things, GE put its energy into lending money—and soon got bogged down in various bad bets, tried to manipulate its way out of trouble and eventually unraveled. But by then, of course, an enormously enriched Welch was long gone.

This past Tuesday marked the end of that particular hubris, as the erstwhile industrial powerhouse completed a three-way split into the independent and much diminished companies of GE Healthcare (spun-off last year), GE Vernova and GE Aerospace. Tellingly, it’s GE Aerospace—a manufacturer, in this case of jet engines—that retains the GE stock symbol. Back to basics!

The one thing GE didn’t do during all that bobbing and weaving is change its name. As much can’t be said for the Good Sam Club, which while hardly in the same class, this week continued a steady march to irrelevance by announcing a rebranding “that could better speak” to a wider audience. As explained yesterday to an RVBusiness reporter by Good Sam executive vice president Will Colling, “when we looked at our niche within the RV space, what we realized is that we’re a road travel and recreation enthusiast company. We will always have the niche within the RV space, but we speak to this broader set of consumers.”

Where to start unpacking all that nonsense? For openers, there’s the mouthful about being a “road travel and recreation enthusiast company,” leading to the observation that the more words it takes to describe what you’re doing, the more unfocused you risk becoming. Ditto for the substitution of generalized descriptors for specific ones, as in “road travel” instead of “RVing,” or “recreation enthusiast” for “camping.”

Then there’s the undeserved cockiness encompassed by the phrase “we will always have the niche within the RV space.” Really? Sure about that?

Once upon a time, veteran RVers will remember, the Good Sam Club was, in fact . . . a club. It claimed more than two million RVers, organized into state and local chapters that sponsored trips and rallies. Its name was derived from the parable of the Good Samaritan, emphasizing that members were ready to assist each other when needed while pursuing this fringe idea of traveling the country in a home on wheels. Its logo featured a stylized smiling face with a halo over its head.

Then it got more corporate. In 2011, Good Sam Enterprises merged with Camping World and began its slide into obscurity—always, of course, with the intention of broadening its appeal by making itself less distinctive. First to go: the smiling face on the logo. Then the word “club” was erased. The network of state and local chapters? Dissolved in 2020, ostensibly because of the pandemic, but then never resurrected. And yesterday came the announcement that the logo has been changed again. Ixnay on the halo—indeed, bye-bye to the name itself. Jumping on the latest corporate rebranding bandwagon, now it’s just initials, “GS,” on a dark shield instead of the formerly distinctive red ball.

And, of course, there’s a suitably meaningless new tagline, “Good to Go.” As in . . . going, going, gone?

Just to be clear about what his company is doing, Will Colling emphasized that a big aspect of the rebranding is a marriage of Good Sam membership and credit card programs into a combined rewards program. Plus the revamped Good Sam will be introducing “cornerstone partnerships,” like a recently announced boat and RV storage center, as well as “other travel partners like Princess Cruise Lines, where we acknowledge that the RV consumer wants to experience more than just road travel.”

Well, sure. The RV “consumer” also wants to eat—consume—actual food, and send kids or grandkids to college or trade school, and buy clothes and electronics, and . . . why, the list of diversification possibilities is endless. Indeed, at some point the whole RVing thing will become a “niche” product under the corporate umbrella, just as kitchen appliances became a distraction for GE, its customer base trickling away because . . . why? As for the “club” aspect that once attracted so many members, or the promise of mutual assistance bound up in the now all-but-invisible name itself? That’s all history. It’s all transactional now.