Saturday Snippets
Robin M’s year of Saabs continues over at Flickr.
The aim is to find and photograph a Saab a day in 2008.
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One of the things I was thinking about seeing whilst in Detroit was The Heidelberg Project. Turns out I didn’t really have the time. Apart from the whole urban art thing, there’s this to see as well….
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I’m unsure as to how this would play out with Saab, but this press release came from GM and then appeared on my SaabUSA feed as well:
DETROIT — General Motors Corp. is further broadening its multicultural marketing efforts and today announced that it will add Sanders\Wingo Advertising, Inc., to its list of advertising agencies to provide African American, urban and youth marketing support for Chevrolet, and Carol H. Williams Advertising to provide African American, urban and youth marketing support for Cadillac, HUMMER, Saab, Saturn and the GM Corporate brand, effective at the end of the first quarter of 2008.
Sanders\Wingo, based in El Paso and Austin, Texas, will help the Chevrolet brand assess its current multicultural marketing activities and identify additional opportunities to evolve and elevate Chevy’s existing African American marketing efforts and increase its business in urban markets.
Carol H. Williams, headquartered in Oakland, Calif., will provide African American, urban and youth advertising creative work for GM’s luxury brands, Cadillac, HUMMER and Saab, as well as Saturn and the GM corporate brand.
In addition, Translation Marketing, a New York City-based brand marketing firm headed by founder and Chief Creative Officer Steven Stoute, will continue to consult with GM in support of the company’s multicultural marketing activities.
Any ideas on what will/could happen for Saab in this arena? I can’t help but think this would be more to do with the Caddy and Hummer divisions, but if there’s a Saab element then it’ll certainly be an interesting campaign to watch.
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An enjoyable and quick review of the Saab 9-3 from Saab’s former US hometown - Atlanta.
Also to be available is a 2.8-liter engine that will produce 280 horsepower.
Tell the guy with the tweed jacket to put that in his pipe and smoke it.
Love that.
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There’s also a good review of the 9-7x Aero doing the rounds.
The Saab 9-7X Aero is greater than the sum of its General Motors parts. It’s a nice combo of Swedish quirk and GM muscle.
Pure GM V-8 power driving rear/all wheels provides the Aero with the darn near ability to fly.
I think I found a large portion of the 9-7x’s market while in Detroit. It’s GM employees who are accustomed to driving SUV’s and enjoy the ability to trade up to the Saab tuned version at a good, GM-discounted price.
Still, I drove it myself while I was there and the Seven certainly knows how to get a move on. Nice interior job, too.
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A few of the cutaway Saab images I’ve amassed here at TS should be added soon to a great resource for cutaway images at a site called Cartype.
If you’re into X-ray car images, this site will knock your socks off!
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Swade,
I visited the SAAB dealership in Mentor, Ohio last week and the salesman tried to talk me into a 9-7x Aero. He said someone had recently put down $50 and paid something like $562 per month. I just smiled and politely declined the offer. I’m still not sure if that was a lease or a 30 year mortgage.
However, I did notice two things while I was there. First, I had to walk to the rear of the SUVs to read which was the Aero model. I honestly couldn’t tell from the front. They all looked about the same to me. Second, the gas mileage is worse than a Jaguar V12 from the 70’s! The window sticker read 12 mpg city and 16 mpg highway. That’s pretty bad.
Well…let’s see. African-American and urban are pretty much the same thing. I rarely see black people in Saabs (I know there are lots of exceptions, of course!), so it can’t hurt to advertise to them. Normally, outside of yuppie-looking women, old white guys, and college punks who obviously got the car from their parents (like me), the only non-white people I see in Saabs tend to be Middle Eastern, for some reason. Though, I was at the gas pump a few weeks ago, and a black dude told me my car was awesome and he had one just like it.
As far as youth…I don’t know. Saab is a little understated to penetrate the stupid boy racer crowd.
Going through the X-Ray pictures site i noticed that GM has a model called GM EV1. i wonder if it has anything remotely to do with the SAAB EV1?
Joe: the GM EV1 was GM’s all-electric car. It was leased in only two U.S. states (California and Arizona). It was the subject of the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?.
It had nothing in common with the Saab EV-1 (well, except for an excellent coefficient of drag). At that time Saab was not owned in any part by GM.
Swade: you need to tell that story Bob Sinclair told us about naming the EV-1! I don’t want to spoil it.
“Well…let’s see. African-American and urban are pretty much the same thing.”
African-Americans live in suburban, rural, and the urban environment. Jeff what is
the point of such a foolish generalization?
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I see many blacks driving saabs. As for the “stupid ricer crowd”, most of that demographic happens to be young asian people. I smell an unpleasant ethnic bias here.
NY3UVL714 - try not to read too much between the lines - Jeff wrote “stupid boy racer”
- give the kid a break
Call letters - Urban is a code word for black in corporate America. Urban music? Rap. Urban clothing? Whatever’s popular with the rappers. I’m not making this up. It’s just what marketers call black trends so they don’t sound racist. That’s why I said it’s the same thing. I didn’t mean urban as in city, I meant urban as in the “urban” (again, code word for black) style, which is basically how those marketing firms were using it. I know black people live everywhere, come on now. I was thinking how marketers think.
I said: “I rarely see black people in Saabs.” I did not say: “Black people don’t drive Saabs.” Remember, I live in Maryland. Hardly any people drive Saabs, let alone black people.
My point with that whole thing was that marketing towards black people, at least around where I live, would be good, because not a lot of black people drive Saabs around here.
I probably should have made myself clearer, it does look like I was saying black people only live in urban areas, which isn’t at all what I meant.
You shouldn’t call them blacks, though, that’s racist. :p just messing with ya.
You know…African Americans have the most homosexuals (percentage-wise) in this country, and that you see lots of black people driving Saabs, cars very popular with gay people, apparently, in San Francisco…do I need to spell it out?
Obviously I’m joking there.
And yes, I did mean to say racer and not ricer, I was thinking the WRX/EVO/M3/GTI/Celica/Civic crowd. Do we really want Saab to try to appeal to those people? Yes, let’s have more Saabs with giant wings, goofy scoops, and crappy decals running around. Good idea.