I don't know. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and I'm just not convinced that GM "destroyed" Saab in the way everyone seems to think. I mean, ultimately, yes, the end-result was that Saab folded and it
was under GM's control. But GM had a lot of slack that they needed to take up. Someone needed to take Saab out of the 80s and get new, younger drivers behind the wheel of their cars. Saab was ill-equipped to do it on their own.
The major grievance that I have with GM is that I feel like their attempt at really marketing Saab was incredibly half-hearted and while from a business-perspective that may have been the "smart" thing to do, to sort of go about it easily, slow and steady, I feel like GM should have really put their guns on it. Saab needed to be revitalized and was in desperate need of an aggressive ad campaign. Unfortunately, no such thing ever materialized.
A good example of this would be the new Buick commercials where they make fun of people being unable to recognize the new look of Buicks. Because let's be honest, most people when they think of Buick think of, well, something like...
The new commercials sort of play upon the idea that most people think of those big, long, boxy, heavy-looking cars when they think of "Buick" when really the new look of Buick is far more modern and refined. It's an effective ad campaign.
Saab should have done something similar, and they might have tried, but it never reached me which is exactly why I was so surprised when I first walked onto a Saab dealership's lot. My exact words were, "
These are Saabs?!"
I was expecting to see a row of the older 900s which many people love and even I am learning to appreciate more and more, but aesthetically, they just don't do much for me. So when I gazed upon a row of 2004, 2005 and 2006 Saab 9-3s that resembled something more like a BMW 3 series than anything else, I was floored!
Can you imagine how many times I must have seen a 2006 Saab 9-3 drive by me and gave it no thought at all? Simply writing it off as maybe a BMW of some kind or a Volvo, anything but a
Saab! Unbelievable...
An ad campaign should have spelled it out for me in the same way these new Buick commercials are doing. Would it have saved Saab? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. I just wish that GM had really gone into it 100% ... and they didn't.