Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

It took some time, but GM's marketers at Saturn finally got it.  I'm talking about those stunningly wrong Saturn TV spots and print ads last year making the car do impersonations of a...(are you ready?)...BMW!  Talk about identity crisis.  Milky Way Galaxy to Saturn brand managers: Your sweet-spot customers had about as much in common with Bimmer people as, well, as Saturns do with BMWs.  They did get the message, however.  When surveys revealed that the BMW imagery "wasn't resonating" with the targets (read: buyers), Saturn learned the lesson, pulled the campaign and soon thereafter fired Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (hey, it's always the agency's fault).  It's been 13 long years since the high-water mark of Saturn sales (286,000 cars).  This year's tally, 260,000, respectable when you consider how far out of touch the "different kind of car company" became with its original vision, is a tribute to customer service -- one of the original brand promises still intact.  Now Saturn looks at its offerings from the vantage of its buyers.  It turned to an on-line chat room a-la Scion and other web-savvy brands like Apple. It even borrowed a page from Lee Iacocca's Chrysler of the early '80s and encouraged tire-kickers to test drive the competition. Wow. A General Motors car being sold from the perspective of the people it's trying to sell to.  No  wonder sales are coming back.