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.
