Saturn Corporation

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Saturn Corporation

SATURN RELAUNCH CAMPAIGN
WHY DIDN'T ANYONE THINK OF THIS BEFORE? CAMPAIGN

100 Saturn Parkway
Spring Hill, Tennessee 37174
USA
Telephone: (931) 486-5000
Fax: (931) 486-5059
Web site: www.saturn.com

SATURN RELAUNCH CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

After establishing a clear identity as a customer-friendly carmaker in the 1980s, Saturn Corporation, a subsidiary of General Motors Corporation (GM), lost its way in the late 1990s. To regain its footing, Saturn designed a new automobile, the Ion, in the early 2000s. Instead of turning over the marketing of the car to its longtime advertising agency, Publicis & Hal Riney, the company opened up the account to the bids of other shops. The winner, in early 2002, was Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, based in San Francisco.

Soon after hiring Goodby for the Ion account, worth approximately $30 to $50 million, Saturn decided to make a complete break with the past and relaunch the Saturn brand. It expanded Goodby's deal into a $300 million account that would encompass all of Saturn's advertising. The Saturn relaunch campaign, which stretched from 2002 until the spring of 2004, was supported by grassroots marketing efforts that involved dealers and included concert sponsorships and promotions at minor league baseball games.

The campaign culminated in the introduction in 2004 of a new tagline, "People first," replacing Saturn's first slogan, "A different kind of company. A different kind of car." While one of the television spots, "Sheet Metal," won prestigious awards, the campaign did not succeed in preventing the erosion of Saturn's sales.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Saturn Corporation was created in the early 1980s as GM's answer to the Japanese automakers that had been successfully selling small cars in the United States. Saturn's approach was unique for U.S. carmakers on a number of levels. Most notably the company replaced the traditional assembly line with flexible work teams and gave its employees extensive training in teamwork, self-direction, and responsibility. In addition Saturn established a "no-haggle" sticker price to appeal to customers who disliked the high-pressure sales tactics of traditional dealers. Years before the first car rolled off the production line, Saturn settled on its customer profile, which was similar to that of the imported-car buyer: people under 40 years of age with an average salary of $51,000, half of whom were college graduates. Because a major part of its market would be on the West Coast, Saturn in 1988 hired San Francisco-based ad agency Hal Riney & Partners (later called Publicis & Hal Riney).

Riney's goal was to build a charismatic brand. Thus all car models were to be called Saturns and distinguished only by numbers. The agency then crafted emotional advertising that focused not on the cars themselves but on the Tennessee town in which the cars were made, the people who built them, and the dealers who sold them. The idea was to get people to root for the company because they related to it. This approach was embodied in the tagline "A different kind of company. A different kind of car." Saturn's advertisements were pure Americana, warm and generous soft sells that told human stories.

Although Saturn was able to develop a mystique through its marketing, the company struggled to sell enough cars to make the venture a true success. By the late 1990s sales had become stagnant. In response Saturn introduced the L-Series midsize sedans and wagons in 1999. The advertising, however, failed to drive sales of these new models, leading some to question whether Riney's low-key approach had lost its edge and if a more traditional tactic might not work better. While Riney developed the advertising campaign for the Vue (Saturn's entry in the sport-utility-vehicle market), a new model called the Ion was in the works.

In 2001 Saturn invited competing ad agencies to bid on the Ion account, estimated to be worth $30 to $50 million, and it was won in 2002 by another San Francisco shop, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. The agency's founders, Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, were former protégés of Hal Riney who had left his firm in 1983 to start their own shop. Immediately after winning the Ion business Goodby inherited the entire Saturn account. Saturn's management had concluded that it was not wise to split responsibilities between the two agencies. Hence Goodby's task grew from promoting the Ion into relaunching the Saturn brand.

TARGET MARKET

Writing for Advertising Age in 2002, Bob Garfield maintained that Riney's "long-cultivated folksiness" approach to advertising the Saturn "attracted certain buyers but repelled many others. The same values that made Saturn appealing to middle-aged, female Consumer Reports subscribers made it uninteresting, even emasculating to men." In a separate Advertising Age article, Garfield described Saturn owners as "utilitarian souls who proudly wore their plodding not-quite-Nissans as badges of inconspicuous consumption." Aside from attracting more female than male buyers, the Saturn also appealed to an older market, with a median age of 44 for its owners. By not offering a version of the L-Series with both a six-cylinder engine and a five-speed manual transmission, the carmaker lost the business of younger drivers who wanted a more robust, fun-to-drive vehicle. A major reason Goodby won the Ion account was that its pitch appealed to these buyers. In its effort to promote the new Ion and to relaunch the Saturn brand, Goodby targeted small-car buyers aged 18 to 34 and attempted to reach a larger percentage of men than had previously chosen a Saturn.

COMPETITION

Saturn originally sought to compete with the Toyota Corolla and the Honda Civic in the subcompact sedan and coupé market, and during the mid-1990s it succeeded in luring a large number of buyers who had previously bought foreign cars. But when the brand was hot, cash-strapped GM failed to invest in bringing out new Saturn models, opting instead to put money into its Oldsmobile brand. While Saturn stood still, Japanese carmakers added features that it was unable to match. Moreover Saturn faced increased competition from South Korea's Hyundai Motor Co. and from U.S. automakers such as Chrysler, which introduced the Plymouth/Dodge Neon subcompact model in 1994. The L-Series, aimed at the midsize-car market, was supposed to be Saturn's salvation, but it proved a major disappointment, selling in far smaller numbers than expected. To make matters worse the company did not keep pace with changing consumer tastes as an increasing number of buyers opted for SUVs and luxury cars.

THE NAME GAME

At the time Saturn was founded, Japanese imports were luring large numbers of customers away from American cars. It was with a pro-American message in mind that GM chose the name "Saturn," a reference to the Saturn rocket that propelled U.S. astronauts to the moon, arguably the greatest technological feat ever accomplished by Americans.

MARKETING STRATEGY

Once the decision was made to move the entire Saturn account from Riney to Goodby, the two agencies shortened the usual three-month transition, and Goodby set to work. Its immediate task was to promote Saturn's newly redesigned small car, the introduction of which would be followed by the launch of the Ion and the redesign of the midsize cars. Instead of discarding the work done by Riney over the years, Goodby elected to build upon it and in some cases play off of it, as evidenced by the new tagline "It's different in a Saturn," which echoed Riney's "A different kind of company. A different kind of car." Nor did Goodby wish to abandon Riney's work in establishing Saturn's core values of honesty and integrity in the minds of consumers. Rather, the shop wanted to make the same points but with a little humor. The most significant departure from the Riney approach was to be an increased emphasis on the car; Goodby had concluded that, after a decade of advertising, the audience had already learned enough about the company. It was ironic, therefore, that the first major television advertisement Goodby developed for Saturn did not even focus on the car.

Jamie Barrett, a Goodby creative director, told Automotive News's Julie Cantwell how his team approached its task. After initial discussions about the car company and what it represented, the team began to focus on Saturn customers and generated concepts such as "people first" and "people before sheet metal." The latter idea became the inspiration for a television spot called "Sheet Metal," which set the stage for the commercials that followed. The concept was to show people pretending to be cars, punctuated by a voice-over at the end: "When we design cars, we don't see sheet metal. We see the people who may someday drive them." Saturn's marketing department instantly embraced the "big idea" nature of the spot, as did director Noam Murro of Biscuit Filmworks in Los Angeles.

Goodby developed four more ideas and then presented "Sheet Metal" before focus groups, where it "effectively bombed," in the words of Barrett, who wrote the script. Nevertheless neither Saturn nor the agency lost faith in the idea, although the reaction of the focus groups led the agency to add 9 seconds of footage of an L-Series car to the end of the 60-second commercial. In a review for Advertising Age, Garfield praised the spot: "The automotive body language of our car nation—from backing out of the driveway to sitting in traffic, to yielding at intersections, to riding the school bus—was reproduced, dead on, in actual body language … It was also beautiful. The choreography, cinematography, direction, and editing were crafted as if there were no joke afoot, and the accompanying piano etude by the Polish/French musician/composer Gregory Czerkinsky is a gentle and irresistible counterpoint."

Many television viewers found the "Sheet Metal" spot captivating, but it was important for other reasons. According to Garfield, "It was also a declaration that the old, clunky, homespun Saturn image was (if the advertising worked) about to change." Barrett told Alison Sloane Gaylin of Shoot that the spot "helped all of us understand what we were trying to do with Saturn. It created a reference point for us."

After creating the first spot, the intention of which was to shape the brand's image, Goodby fashioned product-focused TV commercials that built on the underlying concept of putting "people first" while also targeting younger car buyers. According to Jeff Goodby, the agency wanted to avoid the typical approach of selling cars to young people as "badges of cool." Rather, Barrett explained, the agency conceived of its target market as "young adults who are at an intersection—they are nostalgic about what they are leaving behind, but eager to make the move to full-fledged adulthood." Each of the four spots supporting the Ion launch in January 2003 showed four young adults driving in a car together through a town where everyone was experiencing the same life stages. For instance, in the spot called "Childhood" the passengers encountered an entire town of children playing on rocking horses, swing sets, and slides. Everybody was involved in the prom in one commercial, another portrayed a town devoted to college antics, and in the fourth everyone in town was getting married. Each spot closed with a voice-over that declared, "The all-new Saturn Ion. Specifically designed and engineered for whatever's next." Saturn hoped that the commercials would also appeal to older buyers, who could look back with fondness on their own passage through these stages of life.

"MORNING AGAIN IN AMERICA"

Hal Riney, the man behind Saturn's original soft-selling, folksy advertising approach, was also responsible for one of the most memorable television commercials in the history of politics, the "Morning Again in America" spot for Ronald Reagan's 1984 reelection campaign. The spot featured positive images of everyday people, portraying their lives as having greatly improved since Reagan had become president.

OUTCOME

Goodby's rebranding campaign, which employed the tagline "It's different in a Saturn," came to a close in 2004, when the agency introduced a new series of television commercials that used a streamlined tag: "People first." Research had shown that many people did not understand the line "It's different in a Saturn." As Barrett told Adweek, "We thought, 'Why get cryptic? Let's just tell people about it. Saturn is not about being overtly tricky or clever. We can get this done in two words.'" Although the agency was able to hone the Saturn message, it was not successful in selling more cars. After an uptick in 2002, sales in 2003 dropped 3.2 percent to 271,157 vehicles delivered, a far cry from the more than 1 million comparable entry-level sedans that Honda and Toyota each sold. "Sheet Metal" received a number of accolades, however. Primarily on the strength of the spot, Murro was nominated for the Directors Guild of America award for best commercial director. The spot also garnered the prestigious Gold Lion award for Goodby at the 2003 International Advertising Festival in Cannes, France.

WHY DIDN'T ANYONE THINK OF THIS BEFORE? CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

On November 1, 1998, the Saturn Corporation, a subsidiary of General Motors (GM), became the first car company to offer a three-door coupe when it introduced an updated model of its SC coupe. The third door, a rear access door, made it more convenient to load passengers and cargo into the back seat. Saturn hoped the innovation would shore up its flagging sales and carve out a niche for itself in the shrinking and highly competitive small-car market. Falling fuel prices and a vibrant U.S. economy had led many consumers to eschew smaller, more fuel-efficient cars like those offered by Saturn in favor of pickup trucks, sport-utility vehicles (SUVs), and minivans (vehicles collectively classified as "light trucks"). Saturn turned to its longtime San Francisco-based ad agency, Publicis & Hal Riney, to craft a campaign that would not only announce the coupe's arrival but also send a powerful positive message about the overall Saturn brand. The ensuing $40 million "Why Didn't Anyone Think of This Before?" television, radio, print, and outdoor campaign, which focused specifically on the utility of the third door, used the same quirky humor that had come to define Saturn's marketing.

The primary purpose of "Why Didn't Anyone Think of This Before?" was to highlight the practical elements of the coupe and to underscore Saturn's longstanding marketing position as a "different kind of company." Saturn had been receiving criticism for failing to expand or update its original line of small cars. In "Why Didn't Anyone Think of This Before," the company presented itself as the maker of innovative automobiles designed for the needs—from the utilitarian to the unusual—of innovative drivers. In one of the three commercials, for instance, a child stands alone in a vast, flat field playing "When The Saints Go Marching In" on a tuba. At the end of the spot, his mother arrives in a sporty red Saturn coupe. The third door clicks opens, and the boy climbs into the back seat with his tuba in tow. The message was clear: a Saturn three-door coupe could carry cumbersome items, offered easy access to the back seat, and was suitable for children. The commercial closed with a voice-over. "Arriving at last, from Saturn. The world's first three-door coupe. Why didn't anyone think of this before?" Two print ads that focused on the uniqueness of the third door accompanied the television spots.

Saturn planned to use the three-door coupe as a launching pad for additional new products. It expected to release its first midsize sedan (the LS) in 1999 and first SUV in 2001. Saturn wanted the coupe ultimately to be viewed as merely one facet of an innovative company. In any event, the three-door coupe and its supporting ad campaign proved to be unequivocal successes. Coupe sales rose immediately to unexpected levels, providing "one of the few positive notes in the small-car market," said the Sunday Gazette-Mail. Saturn continued to run "Why Didn't Anyone Think of This Before?" through the spring of 1999. "It was a launch campaign with enough life to last eight months," said Lisa Hutchinson, Saturn's marketing director.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Saturn was founded by GM in 1985 to convince young consumers to return to the flock of domestic car buyers. Years of bland products and bad press had convinced many U.S. consumers that American cars were inferior to Japanese imports, such as those made by Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Company. GM took care not to associate itself too closely with the Saturn name, and gave Saturn management free reign to institute more customer-oriented policies. When the first Saturns rolled off the production line in 1990, they managed to attract consumers who would not ordinarily even consider purchasing a GM vehicle. Saturn also revolutionized the often exasperating process of buying a car. Its dealerships were devoid of the high-pressure sales tactics and horse-trading that were so common in the automobile industry. Instead, Saturn used low-key sales representatives and set-pricing packages. Moreover, the company took pains to inculcate consumers with the notion that purchasing a Saturn was more like joining a community of Saturn owners and employees than simply engaging in a depersonalized financial transaction. Events such as the Saturn Reunion, a gathering at the company's plant in Tennessee to which all Saturn owners were invited, reinforced this image.

Saturn's advertising also stressed its distinctiveness among car companies. Since its inception, Saturn had used the tag line "A Different Kind Of Company. A Different Kind Of Car" in unusual ads conceived by Publicis & Hal Riney. The commercials were slice-of-life vignettes that featured actual Saturn employees and owners. Spots such as one that depicted a security guard who logged 100,000 miles on his Saturn without ever leaving his small town were "unexpected, understated, and unsurpassed in [their] ability to carve out a brand image," according to Advertising Age. "[They] had the most brilliant marketing campaign of any car in the last decade," a marketing analyst told the The Tennessean.

Although Saturn's small cars and unique brand image proved popular, rival companies were quick to imitate Saturn's friendly sales process and excellent service. In addition, the American small-car market grew more competitive, and U.S. gas prices were falling to new lows, undercutting consumers' interest in seeking out fuel-efficient cars like Saturn. Moreover, the booming economy produced more people willing to spend $30,000 or more for trendy SUVs. By 1998 the light truck market accounted for 51 percent of new car sales, while small car sales had plummeted 20 percent between 1997 and 1999. Saturn's troubles were compounded by its limited product line. With only one subcompact car—offered in sedan, coupe, and wagon versions—Saturn did not provide consumers with as many options as did competitors like Toyota. "Their life is dependent on how small cars are selling, and small cars have been tough to sell," an industry expert told AP Online. In the first nine months of 1998, Saturn's sales were 9.6 percent lower than in the same period of 1997, which themselves had been 10 percent less than 1996.

TARGET MARKET

Saturn's strength had traditionally been its appeal to young consumers. The two-door coupe was especially attractive to unmarried drivers who often traveled alone and liked its sports car-like style. The typical coupe was not, however, the most practical of vehicles. It was difficult for passengers to maneuver into the back seat through one of the two front doors, and it was also hard to access the space to stow even such cargo as groceries or laundry. As Saturn's core market of first-time car buyers began to start families, own pets, and grow a bit older, they came to favor roomier cars. Consumers with children were especially prone to disregard the coupe as a car choice. "Well, we've had a child now, so we'll have to go on to another product," said Dennis Aman, a member of the SC launch team. The debut of the three-door SC coupe was intended to address this problem. "We think the access door will … pull in some people who bought sedans before," Jim Ulrich, Saturn's chief engineer.

"Why Didn't Anyone Think of This Before?" reinforced this message by making children central to the campaign. In addition to the "Tuba" spot, Saturn also ran "Pick-Up," an ad that featured a father and a Little League team. After the coupe pulls into the driveway of a model suburban home and disgorges its passengers, a small boy dashes back to close the third door left open. These two commercials touted the utility of the three-door coupe by emphasizing the car's capacity to be a family car—with style.

While the campaign encouraged family-car owners to consider the coupe as a viable car option, Saturn recognized that the primary market for the coupe would still be its base of young, single consumers, who might not appreciate the car's ability to tow tykes and their tubas. A third commercial, "Mannequin," addressed these consumers. The spot opened with the scene of a young man waiting outside a restaurant as a woman leans on his shoulder. A Saturn coupe pulls up, and he proceeds to load the "woman"—now recognizable as a mannequin—through the rear door into the back seat. By stressing that the three-door coupe could carry any item, no matter how unusual, Saturn made its point to childless viewers. Moreover, even the commercials that did use kids as the focus did not resort to sentimentality. The edgy humor and quirky scenarios would draw in all viewers, with or without families.

COMPETITION

Saturn wanted to broaden the coupe's appeal because of the severe contraction in the small-car market. According to the Wall Street Journal, by 1998 "sales of conventional passenger cars have slumped to levels not seen since the early 1980s recession." As companies jostled to maintain market share in a shrinking pool of consumers, competition grew ever more fierce. In its bid to boost sales, Saturn was confronted by several rivals. In January of 1999, DaimlerChrysler AG debuted its model-year 2000 Neon, which it sold under both its Dodge and Plymouth nameplates. When the Neon was first launched it 1994, the company (then Chrysler) attempted to imbue the car with a likable personality. This "Hi" campaign anthropomorphized the small Neon. Although "Hi" was critically-acclaimed, DaimlerChrysler devoted $40 million to a new television, print, outdoor, and web banner campaign by BBDO Worldwide that began in March of 1999. "We tried to get away from cute, so the ads are more sophisticated," Arthur Liebler, a senior vice president at DaimlerChrysler told Advertising Age. The initial commercials were set to familiar song melodies, to which comedian George Carlin provided voice-overs of Neon-praising lyrics. In one ad, a Neon was shown in a field of sunflowers while Carlin intoned lines like "When your foot hits the gas and you're off in a flash—that's amore" to the strains of the Dean Martin classic. The Ford Motor Company's Escort was another challenger. In February 1998 Ford launched a new campaign created by ad agency J. Walter Thompson that encompassed the entire Ford division. These spots, which featured actor John Corbett, incorporated the tag line "Built to Last" into stories about Ford cars and their owners.

Saturn would also need to fend off imports to prosper. Toyota's Corolla received considerable media spending in the brand-wide "Everyday" campaign created by Saatchi & Saatchi, which debuted in the fall of 1997 and continued to run through 1999. The television ads incorporated the song "Everyday People" by Sly and the Family Stone and stressed Toyota's reliability. In March 1998 eight-page "Everyday" spreads appeared in major magazines like Life, People, and Time. In the summer of 1998 Toyota debuted the Solara, a coupe that directly challenged Saturn's SC. Honda's Civic also vied for the consumers Saturn desired. Although the model-year 1999 Civic was redesigned, Honda continued to use agency Rubin Postaer & Associates, which had crafted the company's advertising since the Civic was introduced in 1974. Spots for the Civic remained product-focused. Moreover, in March of 1998, Volkswagen AG launched its New Beetle into what the Wall Street Journal termed "a cutthroat market" and captured the bulk of the attention aimed at the small-car sector. To support the New Beetle, agency Arnold Communications conceived clever print and television ads that not only conjured up memories of the iconic original Beetle, but also proved popular among younger consumers.

MARKETING STRATEGY

"Why Didn't Anyone Think of This Before?" sought to carve out a distinct niche for the three-door Saturn SC coupe. To succeed in this venture, the campaign needed to make consumers take note of the coupe and its most unique aspect—the rear access door. This was, of course, no easy task since viewers were inundated with a virtual tidal wave of car advertising. But Publicis and Hal Riney strove to create ads that were intensely engaging and that captivated the viewer. One crucial aspect of this strategy was the initial teaser (or bookend) spot. Without revealing the brand or the product, Saturn aired a commercial that simply showed a child playing a tuba. During the next commercial break, the final version played, which showed the three-door Saturn coupe arriving and picking up the young tuba player. The goal was to entice viewers to wait for the follow-up ad and watch closely to see what product was being hawked with such an odd commercial.

Since Saturn hoped to reach a wide array of viewers, the company used national television as its primary venue. The campaign aired on an assortment of programs, ranging from 60 Minutes to shows that captured a younger audience, such as The X-Files and The Simpsons. This initial blitz was supported with print ads in both regional newspapers and national lifestyle magazines, such as Sports Illustrated, and newsweeklies. These print pieces broke new ground for Saturn. Rather than relying on its usual print method of presenting stories describing Saturn owners or employees, the company ran two mostly graphic ads ("Convention" and "Fox") that focused on the coupe itself. The copy was spare, the visual images striking and simple. Billboard versions of these spots were erected in major markets and made available to local Saturn dealers. Radio ads and point-of-sale material in Saturn dealerships provided the final elements of the campaign.

FROM THE MOUTHS OF BABES

The concept of the three-door coupe came from neither the company's design team nor from marketing planning sessions. Instead, Stuart Lasser, a Saturn dealer, suggested the idea at a meeting. His eight-year-old son had complained loudly about climbing into the rear seat of the family's two-door model. "Everybody just kind of stopped dead in their tracks and wondered why this hadn't been thought of before," a company representative told the Northern New Jersey Record.

OUTCOME

Despite the pessimism of some commentators who predicted the failure of both the three-door SC coupe and the campaign to support it, Saturn was so convinced of the coupe's potential that it made the three-door design standard. "It's going to bring a different customer into our coupes, a broader market," an SC launch team member told The Tennessean. After one month, Saturn's optimism was justified as sales rose. In December 1998 Saturn reported "its first month-over-month increase since April," according to the Sunday Gazette-Mail. Sales continued to increase through January. In fact, coupe sales were 28 percent higher than in 1997. Moreover, the portion of Saturn's overall sales composed of coupe sales rose from 15 percent to 20 percent. This double digit growth continued during the months after the campaign's inauguration. Even more striking was the fact that Saturn's coupe sales soared during winter months, normally a slow sales period for the sporty model.

The "Why Didn't Anyone Think of This Before?" campaign itself was also well-received. Advertising Age pronounced the commercials to be "marvelous." Marketing director Hutchinson told the February 8, 1999, edition of Advertising Age that the spots "broke through clutter and helped Saturn's coupe sales." The company continued to run the campaign through the spring of 1999, at which point it was shelved in favor of new ads touting the LS, Saturn's forthcoming midsize sedan.