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For Saturn, the
Time is Now
Date: Dec 14, 2006
Source:
BusinessWeek
Author: David
Kiley
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For Saturn, The Time Is Now
The year 2007 will be crucial for GM's struggling Saturn. It's finally
got the great new cars it needed—but buyers still need to be convinced
by
David Kiley
General Motors' Saturn is on the verge of either proving itself as an
invaluable brand for the company's financial future or becoming an
example of how the automaker is incapable of managing a brand no matter
how good a lineup of product it has in the showroom.
After 16 years in existence, why now? Because it finally has a lineup
of vehicles that is not only as good a group of products as General
Motors (GM)
has ever lined up under a brand, but products that stack up very
favorably against the likes of Nissan (NSANY)
and a resurgent Hyundai, as well as, in some cases, Toyota (TM)
and Honda (HMC).
If the automaker has truly looked after manufacturing quality as well as
they say to improve Saturn's J.D. Power ratings, then the X factor is
whether the current team managing Saturn's sales and marketing can
successfully go back to the future with its advertising and rekindle the
engaging and memorable Saturn story that launched the brand in 1990.
The new Saturn products are that good. The
Saturn Sky is as good a
rendering of a sexy two-seater as the Mazda Miata, and as good as cars
that cost $10,000-plus more (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/31/06,
"Sky High"). The new Aura
sedan, while an unproven newcomer, gives the Honda Accord a run for
performance, fit, finish, and design from every angle (see
BusinessWeek.com, 10/4/06,
"Saturn's Awesome Aura"). The new
Outlook, a
seven-passenger crossover SUV that I drove this month, is so well
executed that my notebook is virtually empty under the heading
"Negatives" (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/30/06,
"Saturn's Great New Outlook").
Niche Must Grow
The Vue compact SUV,
which includes the Green Line
hybrid, is not the best in segment. But it's close enough to even the
newest redesigned Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4 to merit close
consideration by anyone shopping in the small SUV segment. It has the
advantage over its Asian rivals of being offered in a hybrid version.
That leaves just the Saturn Ion
as the weak sister in the showroom. And that car goes away in 2007 to
make way for the far superior Opel
Astra, currently
available in Europe, which will be rebadged and slightly repackaged for
Saturn for next fall.
Saturn's sales, not surprisingly, are on the upswing. October sales
were up 20% from the same month a year earlier, and November sales were
up 24%. Those numbers, of course, were helped by the sales swoon that
took place a year ago after GM, Ford (F),
and DaimlerChrysler's (DCX)
Chrysler division pulled ahead sales in the late summer with
employee-pricing offers. On the year, Saturn is up just 3.5%. The brand
sold 205,000 vehicles, spread across five models, in the first 11 months
of this year. To put that in perspective, Toyota sold 331,000 Corollas
alone so far this year. Hyundai sold 131,000 Sonata sedans—just one
model—so far this year. So, as a whole brand division under GM, Saturn
right now can, at best, be called a niche. Saturn is on track to sell
about 220,000 this year, down from 280,000 in 2002.
But it has to be more than a niche to earn its keep. And with product
as good as it has arriving now, that means Saturn must reclaim some of
its "brand story," which has been lost in recent years as GM has
grappled internally with Saturn's sentimental and grassroots past.
Saturn was patterned after both Japanese styling and manufacturing
techniques, giving workers greater involvement in the making of the
cars. But the company never made a profit and, in 2004, GM folded Saturn
into the rest of the company.
On the Comeback Trail
Yet Saturn at one time inspired thousands of owners to converge at
the company's Spring Hill (Tenn.) factory to share and celebrate their
affection for the brand. That imagery and spirit around the brand still
resonates with baby boomers who bought into the Saturn story about
superior dealer service and slightly
offbeat cars that had plastic outer panels that could take a crash from
a wayward shopping cart without registering a ding.
The plastic panels are gone, but so is a lot of the brand "story."
For most of Saturn's 16 years, it was starved of new product. And in the
last decade, most of the new product it got inspired yawns and grimaces
rather than the smiles that it drew when the brand was launched: the
Ion subcompact, with its
center-mounted instrument panel and pedestrian styling; the
Vue SUV, which had had
its share of quality issues; the dreadful
LS sedan and wagon, which
was a U.S. version of a mediocre Opel model in Europe; the
Relay minivan, which was
one of a quartet of GM minivans that even GM employees were loathe to
buy over a Honda, Toyota, or Chrysler.
Jill Lajdziak, general manager of the Saturn division, knows that the
time is now for her brand to make a genuine comeback. But she also knows
that the brand is not hitting the right chords in its advertising. "We
know we have a lot of goodwill with buyers and even people who haven't
bought Saturns, and we are looking for the right voice," says Lajdziak.
No patron of marketing as usual, Lajdziak is a tireless booster of the
brand. She recently left an Aura
sedan parked in front of her house just before it went on sale
because she was hoping someone in her suburban Detroit neighborhood
would ring her bell. Someone did, and Lajdziak all but closed them at
her dining room table.
In the past year, Lajdziak traveled to suburban Washington, D.C., to
visit the Webmaster of a Saturn enthusiasts' site, and sat at his
kitchen table asking his opinion on marketing outreach and explaining
the product and marketing strategy. "The people who follow the brand are
very important to us," she says. Saturn has also conducted some 70,000
live online chats with individuals who visited the Saturn site in the
last year. Only Toyota 's Generation Y-targeted Scion brand markets that
way as well.
Marketing Loses the Plot
Lajdziak, and GM as a whole, struggles a bit with Saturn's almost
legendary advertising past. Ads that Hal Riney & Partners created
between 10 and 16 years ago are still talked about as material for
business school case studies like classic Volkswagen ads from the 1960s.
Fans of the ads can play them back almost frame for frame. There was the
young woman who was buying her first car and was taken such good care of
at the dealer. There was the teacher who sent her picture to Saturn so
workers would know for whom they were building a car (the last worker to
touch the car tucked the picture back into the car). There was the guy
who kept hitting Saturn dealerships for free service, even when he
didn't need it, so he could get the free doughnuts. And there was the ad
filmed at the Saturn owners' gathering at Spring Hill.
These days, Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco handles
Saturn advertising. And despite the agency's reputation for being one of
the best in the world—it produced the "Got Milk" campaign for the
California Milk Processors Board—Saturn ads have drifted the last four
years. It has had three different ad slogans. Ads have ranged from a
clever, offbeat ad with no cars in which people moved about suburban and
city streets as if they were miming driving, to a recent effort for the
Aura, which was loaded
with boring images and copy that looked like so much other banal car
advertising.
Now, as Saturn is in the middle of launching new models such as the
Sky, Outlook, Aura, and Vue
Green Line, the manufacturer's conversations with Goodby have
centered on the "Gotta Show the Product" mantra. Indeed, it must. But
not at the expense of a coherent brand story. Saturn, despite lagging
behind the industry average in J.D. Power's Initial Quality Study, which
measures consumer complaints in the first 30 days of ownership, is still
the leading nonluxury brand in Power's survey of how well consumers like
the sales and service experience at the dealership. (Like
BusinessWeek.com, J.D. Power is a division of The McGraw-Hill Cos. (MHP).)
Not There Yet
The new advertising has been bloodless, right down to the changed
tagline: "Saturn. Like Always. Like Never Before." That line, launched a
few months ago, replaced the short-lived "People First" ad line. The
Saturn team reckoned that "People First" would not do enough to herald
all the new product. Balderdash! All this new product Saturn has coming
online is excellent, but it has a short history with people, or none at
all. That's all the more reason to really reach for the stars
creatively.
Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield put it this way
about the new advertising: "The paradoxical tagline happens to be
correct, but in exactly the opposite way intended. This commercial (for
the Aura sedan) is indeed like always—like brainless car intros have
always been. And it is like never before in the sense that is utterly
devoid of the values and brand ethos that have undergirded every Saturn
until now."
I'll take issue with one thing Garfield says. The ads haven't really
consistently captured Saturn's brand ethos in some time. I'm loath to
blame Goodby, which does such good work for other clients. Lajdziak has
some explaining to do. GM has a system by which engineering, product,
and salespeople get rotated into advertising and marketing jobs. This
creates a "playbook" mentality at the midlevels. GM ad and marketing
people tend to be cautious automotive generalists instead of
professional marketers. But Lajdziak has been at the helm long enough
that she should be surer of herself than to allow advertising created by
an excellent agency drift to the extent that it has.
Why get all exercised about Saturn? Unlike brands like Hyundai, Kia,
Nissan, Mitsubishi, and even Honda, Saturn has a glorious advertising
past. Comparisons to its own past may be the toughest the brand
organization may ever face. But in that, there is an advantage. For
years, Saturn got along with mediocre product, great service, and
terrific brand energy. Now that it has tremendous product arriving in
showrooms, it mustn't lose its way in the advertising, which recently
seems to go better with the mediocre product of the past. Saturn's
advantage is that it doesn't need to mimic anyone else's marketing
strategy. It doesn't even need to mimic its own past like some pathetic
Rocky VI movie. It just needs to remember why people care
about Saturn and are willing to root for it again. And it needs to make
that brand imagery relevant to people who weren't even of driving age
when other automakers were studying Saturn ads for the way marketing
ought to be done.
