During my recent trip to Detroit, I had the good fortune to sit down with Saab’s own Gunilla Gustavs (in a 9-3 Convertible, no less) and chat about the Saab Brand Center. We’ve all heard the name mentioned, but there’s a certain amount of mystery that surrounds this ‘place’.

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Would you mind telling us who you are and where you work, please?

My name is Gunilla Gustavs and I am responsible for products and communications on a global basis at Saab Automobile, I work out of Gothenburg and Trollhattan.

OK. What I’d like to talk about is the Saab Brand Center. You work at the Brand Center? ……Is there a building with a sign out the front saying “Saab Brand Center”?

(laughs) No. No, and I think that is one of the tricky things. Had there been a building it would be much easier to explain. What the Saab Brand Center is, is a group of people who meet every week, with projects to work out where Saab stands. What does Saab stand for as a brand and how do we ensure that that which is important gets put into what a customer sees: Into the products, those things that a person will touch and feel and experience and even in the customer experience, that’s also something that’s important to a customer.

So these are people based in Trollhattan and in Gothenburg?

Yeah

Elsewhere?

No, not at the moment.

It’s people who are based out of Sweden, and that’s really important – that that activity, that group, that core of people is based out of Sweden because that is so central to the brand. Intitially in the thinking, we had considered that we would have a physical place where we would all sit together and in that way, cross-pollenate ideas, because we’re sitting together as a Saab Brand Center – that was one of the initial ideas, but actually another element is that we all work for our respective functions.

So I work in communications and my marketing colleagues work in marketing and all the engineers that work in the brand center work in their respective engineering functions, the designers work for design. So that is as important as it is to belong to the Saab Brand Center. You have your functional role, but then we get together as the Saab Brand Center.

What’s beautiful about it is that cross-functional exchange of ideas. Had it been a small company all sitting in the same place, that would have happened more naturally. As a large company I think maybe it’s harder to get those creative ideas going. Here you have maybe 10 or 12 people centered around a project – you have 3 engineers there, you have a designer and you have a communications person, a marketing person. Theyre all discussing, for example, “well, what should our strategy be regarding progressive design going forward?” You look at specific aspects of design. Of course, the designers take the lead but everybody weighs in on that.

That was going to be my next question….what sort of things are you doing at the brand center, what are the responsibilities of the brand center.

The role of the Saab Brand Center is to ensure the consistency of the Saab brand, globally, and that the brand doesn’t stay static – that it evolves.

We talk a lot about the brand DNA, that we’re true to our roots and who we are, and how do we take that and evolve it, moving forward. And then very specifically, how does that get manifested in the products that we develop?

How it’s set up is in the form of projects. The projects are more strategic in nature and they have to do with the brand pillars. So we have projects around progressive design and then there’s sub-projects within there: what is our external design strategy? Our interior design strategy? What are our over all design cues? We define things like the hockey stick C-pillar, the front grille – all of that is very well worked out and very well documented, so we can, in turn, communicate with those people who aren’t as familiar with the Saab brand: this is what a Saab is all about.

Another example is turbo characteristics. So when we were developing everything in Trollhattan, all the engineers there, they develop in the course of their work what a Saab turbo engine should sound like, how it should perform, and feel. But when you have development and it’s a global world, development is not only happening in Trollhattan, it’s happening in other places as well and there are very good things, good reasons to do that. But you cannot just tell a powertrain engineer who has not been working with Saab “OK, engineer in some turbo characteristics”. The engineer will say “well, what are the values you want to hit?”

That alone is a really good exercise because if you asked five or six specialists in Saab, maybe together they could come up with a really good turbo engine, but they’ve never really had to define it. So now you have that discussion, you have that debate. You have the voices in there from communications or marketing saying, for example, “well, before we really had a value in the way it sounded and people seem to appreciate that and I’ve got some articles from before that that is expected and this engine did not deliver on the sound, so maybe we should think about that….” So the project is ‘define the turbo engine’s characteristics’….you have discussion back and forth, some testing and then we put it down, and we have the definition now: this is what Saab turbo engines have to deliver in terms of sound, driving characteristics, etc.

That’s good. I was going to ask you if there were any concrete examples, like on the 2008 car - what sort of things did you go through at the brand center? What’s something we could see that’s come out of that?

That’s where it gets a little bit difficult as it’s a little bit more future-focused than that. The functions, like the engineers, the designers….if we were to change the knobs or something like that, they’re doing it for a reason, they’re working in their engineering capacity and they’re not necessarily part of the brand center, but the brand center works a few years in advance of that to say “this is what a Saab interior knob should look like …”

…Feel free to talk about the future things you’re working on now for 2 or 3 years time….

Well, it is these strategies. A lot of discussion about responsible performance. What is our alternative fuel strategy? What is our hybrid strategy? How will that all roll out, and fit together and is that consistent with the brand and the performance that Saab offers?

So we’re looking at…what do we, as a brand, want, and then communicating that more broadly in the organization so that we can get what we want. And that’s a good example because if you only deal project by project you only ask for certain things, but this helps us put everything into a really long term strategy – “why do we want this at this time, and how does that impact this longer term, bigger picture goal, so that we’re really building that consistency of the brand long term?” And we see it as a really vital component of how we’re going to work going forward.

I think it’s seen as an exciting new way to work with brands. Some of the other brands within GM are saying “oh, maybe we need a brand center”. So you might see other versions, other brands.

In physical terms, how many people are we talking about here, getting together on a Thursday?

I think there would be about 30 or 40 people who are really actively involved in these meetings. I think there are around 120 people or so who are officially involved with the brand center. Some are more active than others. My little team of six people, we are all involved in one or more of these projects.

For example, Peter Backstrom (curator of the Saab Museum in Trollhattan and a vast repository of Saab knowledge) is involved in two. One concrete example is our current work on Saab seats. “What is a Saab seat?” We have been, over all, very consistent with Saab seats but Peter knows the exceptions and he can tell you what it is about the proposed seat in Future Car X that is consistent with a Saab seat, or he can say “you know what? That’s not really a Saab seat” and he’ll tell you why. There aren’t that many people that reflect on what a Saab seat should be like, for example.

Are there more people like Peter, with such an incredible knowledge of the company, involved?

Peter is kind of unique in his holistic, deep understanding of the history, the heritage of Saab. But there are definitely other people with a lot of Saab history involved.

I’m thinking of some safety engineers, the whole safety thought process and real life safety. The people that are sitting in the brand center, they have a lot of Saab experience and going back to our last example, maybe they could say this is what makes a Saab seat safe. Those individuals, do they have as much background as Peter Backstrom? Probably not, but they have the detailed knowledge in there area.

There’s also chassis engineering, which is another key area. Or designers, like Simon Padian, who’s a key member of the Saab Brand Center team, and has a very good knowledge of Saab and is really invaluable from a design point of view.

So you’re working on cars and their development or is it also marketing and communications, all that sort of thing. Is there things that you do in the brand center that we end up seeing on billboards in Australia and in communications in Australia?

Very indirectly. A large number of those 120 people are marketing people so it’s very natural that that thinking, and that what the brand wants to emphasise, comes through quite naturally. What gets discussed in the Saab Brand Center also gets incorporated into the marketing and into the PR thinking. So we have something called the Marketing Core Group. I, as a PR person, am a part of that. Even Parveen Batish, from Australia, comes up for those meetings, as he did when he was in the UK.

He’ll actually physically attend that meeting?

Yeah. Maybe not every time, but often enough….. So what you, what the world will see in the future are products that will deliver on the brand. Are we going to proactively say “look how clever we are with the Saab Brand Center?” No. It’s just got to feel like a Saab and if it does, then fantastic. We don’t need to show you how it was made.

So the brand center is designed to fly under the radar, but it’s presence is felt in how things are designed and presented and done….

And also, I’ve been with Saab for a long time now, I know that this is a really good way to make sure that everyone is in agreement with what the Saab brand is. And not just on a theoretical level but also how it actually translates into the car.

Therefore, if we involve other functions within General Motors, which is – business wise – a smart way to build cars.. I am much more confident that we’ll be able to tell these people what we want and what we need to have. We will also be able to say “OK, maybe we don’t need a Saab specific fuel tank” because there are other things we would prioritise, and frankly, does the customer really care if it is a shared fuel tank or not? We can spend the money on the right things.

I think the feeling from the people that I talk to, which are the owners, drivers and enthusiasts, is that having an Opel fuel tank or something like that is neither here nor there. It’s things like the buttons, the design of the stuff that you touch and feel … the fact that we’d like these things to be… Saab things. Individual things. The stuff behind it, the switches, the circuits…

Do you care?

No, I don’t. I want it to work and work well. But this is me speaking personally, I don’t really want to see these controls (pointing out audio etc within the convertible) in a base level Holden. If it’s a global premium brand, I think a lot of the people that buy it would like it to have a premium feel to it …and half of that is getting a distinct feel.

Exactly. And this is where it’s equally important for other brands to understand what makes their brand tick. Cadillac, for example, they have a good idea of who they are and what their brand is right now. Some have a better idea than others.

Well, I have to wrap things up now and find Steve Shannon, so thank you very much.

You’re welcome…