This is a Saab blog, so I’ve put that headline in Saab terms. But transpose any company you like in there and ask the same question – who should be having input into the products that a company sells?

Go and read nearly any book on Saab’s birth and development and the stories that you’ll encounter are about Sixten Sason, Bjorn Envall, Rolf Mellde, Gunnar Ljungstrom and Sten Wennlo. With the possible exception of Mr Wennlo (I don’t know much about him) all the others are engineers or designers. These were the guys who devised Saab’s early products.

We all hold on quite proudly to the fact that Saab started in the car business with a clean sheet of paper and designed a car the way they thought it should be made. It was the 1940′s and relatively little was known about car esign. They didn’t have too much conventional thinking to weigh them down so they set about making a car for the Swedish people. Those early cars had their faults and limitations, but they also had the essence that would carry Saab right into the 1990s – an incredible feat.

Other notable car companies have done the same thing: they’ve adopted a particular philosophy and developed it, expanded it, honed it to perfection. Think of Porsche, Ferrari, BMW. Even Toyota and Subaru have done the same thing within their own corporate philosophies. These are the things that happen when you allow engineers and designers to drive product development. You get great products that the sales and marketing people can then go out and sell.

Where is all this leading, I hear you ask?

GM has recently started to show real signs of the design-led recovery that Bob Lutz keeps talking about. It’s really encouraging.

But I’m still puzzled by the recent corporate realignment that sees one guy taking charge of three GM Premium brands in North America and how his position is going to influence the development of those three brands. I asked questions about this last week and I still haven’t received an answer from Saab USA yet.

Consider this article from Advertising Age today:

Importantly, the new VPs will have a seat at GM’s product-development councils, which Peter Ternes, a GM spokesman, said was “the biggest change.” Under the current system, a centralized global panel headed by product czar Bob Lutz decides which models will be made. Three of the four new channel chiefs “will have a voice” on new products, the spokesman said…..

….This is a change that will make marketers at many other companies very jealous. Brand champions are typically charged with being the ears of their companies, using either traditional market research or, more recently, social-media tools to garner insights about what consumers want. But it’s still relatively rare that they get to impart those insights early enough in the process to influence the product.

I’m not sure which one makes me more nervous – a group of Lutzian yes-men gathering in a dark room deciding which crumbs might fall from the table in Saab’s direction. Or a group of Lutzian yes-men including a brand chief who’s got to divide his thoughts between three premium brands for the US, one of which is distinctly un-American and a smaller chance for him to hit the home-run that’ll get him to that next rung on the corporate ladder.

Forgive my scepticism, but Saab already had a chief in the US and I just don’t see how adding another later of management is going to help things.

And I really don’t see how giving this new guy influence and input in product decisions is going to help things, either. Any student of 1980s and 1990s major-brand vehicles would know that allowing the marketing people too much influence results in cars that drive like pancakes, look out of date before they’re developed and are underengineered thanks to costs being reallocated to the parties with the shiniest teeth.

I want Saabs to be Saabs. I want all the great design elements that made Saabs of the past so distinctive. I don’t want to re-live the past, but I want each and every Saab to fresh, new and yet familiar.

Saab have two crucial things going for them – potential and soul. The marketers can help to realise the former, but its the engineers and designers who make the latter. I hope the cat in the hat understands this. All three of his brands will be better off for it if he does.