SATURN ADS

from Building Strong Brands
(see http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/~market/PAPERS/AAKER/BOOKS/BUILDING/saturn.html)

The First Saturn Ad--Going Home

EFX: MUSIC THROUGHOUT NARRATOR: There was Barney, Billy, Scooter, and me.	We grew up on the corner of Jefferson and Palmer. And if you lived there then, you lived, breathed, swore at, and by, cars.
EFX: The more buck toothed and hole riddled the better. We grew up some. Went away. But we came back to build Mustangs, Corvettes, and GTO's. Among other things.	It was the '60s. And of all the things we could be thinking about, we still mostly thought about cars.
Life was good. Work was good. But then, the oil dried up.	And it seemed like overnight somethin' happened to the way people thought about cars. It got frustrating
Then I decided to go to work for a company called Saturn, and build cars again. But in a brand new way.	There were some things I knew I'd miss. . . But there were certain things I wanted to remember. EFX: MUSIC OUT
Reprinted with permission of Saturn.

EFX: MUSIC UP & UNDER THROUGHOUT EFX (TV SET) 78 degrees today. In other news, the first Saturn car will be rolling off the line in Spring Hill.	NARRATOR: It used to be, I saw the product that I was making, but that was just one part of the thousands of parts that went into the makeup of a car.
"It's going to be some day, I guess." There was no way I would ever see the cars that it went into. The way things were done, I wasn't involved.	No one would ever ask me what I thought. Then I heard about Saturn building a whole new car plant to build a new car. And they figured out a new way of running things too.
No one else in the world had done all this, not that I know of, not since the Model T anyway. Raw material comes in the back door and a car comes out the other end.	Seems to me, that when you see where your part fits into the big picture, it means a lot more. It's my perception anyway.
Now we got people watching us, some are for us, some are against.	But I'll tell you, when I go to the end of this building and I see that car sitting there, I'm gonna feel alright
Gonna be a great feelin' to know that I was a small part of history. EFX: MUSIC OUT
Reprinted with permission of Saturn.

Saturn continually reinforces the idea that they are reintegrating production, consumption and community.  One ad features a school teacher's letter to Saturn regarding the production of her car. A female voice-over reads the letter against a montage of shots that mix her relationship with students at Wood Acres School with production at the Saturn assembly plant.

"Dear Saturn Team members who are building my car, My name is Judith Reusswig and I'm a third grade teacher. Last week I placed an order for a Saturn SL2. After reading the Time magazine article and seeing them around town, I decided my new car would be a Saturn. I liked the whole idea of what Saturn was about. It is one of those things I try to instill in my kids, so I hope it is
true. It reminded me a little bit of a mom and pop operation in the old days where you made a car for this person and this person was happy with the car they got. I just wanted you to know that you were building that Saturn with the blue green exterior and gray interior for me. So you know who I am, I am enclosing my school picture. I'm looking forward to my new car. I'm sure if everything
I read is true, I won't be disappointed."
               

The ad structures a correspondence between the teacher and her students and the workers who comprise the Saturn production team. Each shows care and devotion. She gives her students personalized attention, the same attention Saturn workers give to producing cars. Both produce quality products. Referred to as team members, abstract impersonal labor at Saturn is reconstituted as a community of laborers characterized by organic relations. This historical reference comparing Saturn's production to a "mom and pop operation in the old days when you made a car for this person" is a total fabrication, created to wrap Saturn in the legitimacy of a romantic past. Abstract labor is personalized and so is the abstract consumer. Saturn is no longer a commodity but a personally produced automobile. And the consumer is no longer an abstraction but a warm, honest woman with roots deep in her community. Commodity and market relations disappear in Saturn's narrative. The ad ends with a worker reading her letter, looking at the enclosed photograph, and smiling with the pleasure that he participated in making a quality product for a quality person. In Saturn's story, all the elements of the commodity form (abstract labor, market relations, impersonalism, exchange value, standardization) have been replaced by communalism and personalism. In this context it is useful to reread Karl Marx on the commodity form, because in a ghostly way ads like this ideologically invert, item for item, the relationships that are structured by the commodity form.