Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
The Demise of Saturn
One of the overlooked consequences of all the trouble in Detroit is the likelihood that the Saturn brand will be among those sold or (more likely) “phased out” by GM by 2011.
Saturn was born in June 1985, when the then GM CEO Robert B. Smith announced GM’s first new brand in seventy years. Saturn cars were to be made by a stand alone company, that was to (it was hoped) revolutionize American auto manufacturing, in response to the rapid encroachments by the Japanese brands in small cars.
Of course, this is a primarily a story about labor relations. Saturn was innovative in everything from the factory to the showroom. (Although not, curiously, the designs which were as aggressively boring as all of GM’s other brands.) But the big story was the manufacturing, made possible equally by technology and concessions by unions in return for collaboration by unions.
Yet it was also a story of a revolution in branding. I first wrote about it in 2002 in a chapter called ‘The Company Brand’ in a collection of essays called ‘Brand New Brand Thinking’. I argued that its tagline: “A Different Kind of Company. A Different Kind of Car”, was the first to link the company’s values to the brand’s. The tagline was the definitive statement of ‘company brands’.
The legendary introductory ads (created by Hal Riney & Partners) are some of the best car advertising ever.
Many others have commented on the Saturn brand. Douglas Atkins looks at it in detail in “The Culting of Brands”, with regard to the extraordinary customer loyalty it evoked. This was most manifest in the Saturn Homecomings. The first was attended in June 1994 by more than 40,000 owners and their families in the manufacturing plant Spring Hill, Tennessee. We’re used to hearing about these sort of events among Star Trek and Harley Davidson fans, but this was an extraordinary cult for what was, if we’re honest, a very ordinary car.
Initial growth was strong and Saturn led in JD Powers customer satisfaction studies.
Various factors led to the brand’s demise. Infighting within GM led to it being starved of resources. As gas prices fell in the nineties, sales shifted to larger and larger cars. Saturn failed to innovate. Most importantly, the labor experiment didn’t work. A change in leadership at the UAW resulted in renegotiation of labor contracts, and a return to shift work. The brand never matched the continual quality improvements of the Japanese.
So was the experiment in branding as unsuccessful as the experiment in labor practices? I don’t think so. To me it stands as one of the most influential campaigns of all time.
It was a pioneer case in proving that a brand was the total sum of customer’s experiences. When a fault was found in the engine’s antifreeze. Saturn replaced all of the affected cars immediately. The news story was extraordinary.
It was a pioneer in having advertising and PR interact with each other publically, which on other posts, I’ll argue is the future of brand communications.
It was a pioneer in selling people a company as much as a physical product. You can see the influence of this notion in new age corporate reputation campaigns, such as GE’s “Ecoimagination” and others.
So there is much to mourn in its passing.
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