SATURN
“Like Always. Like never before.”
Saturn, the quirky little car company owned by GM, was starting to grow up. Finally, after several years they began to make cars that were, do we dare say, stylish, even sexy. Much thanks goes to better engineering and European design. Nevertheless, this was the campaign that intended to bridge the two worlds between die-hard Saturn loyalists and new car buyers that needed more coaxing before they’d consider driving off the lot.
OOH To kick off Saturn’s new brand positioning, “Like always. Like never before.”, we launched billboards, bus shelters, and taxi tops in select cities. The OOH boards highlighted just a single word. A week later, new boards went up directly over the old that aligned the Saturn brand to the message.
DESIGN
In addition to developing all of the Saturn brand advertising, we were also tasked with supporting the dealer network with a massive sea of printed materials, mostly, brochures and sales literature. Although, our aim wasn’t to produce ordinary “car brochures”. For ever new Saturn model launched we dove deep into the sentiment and soul of what makes Saturn different from other car companies, and tried to interject that into each design.
“Sky Launch Brochure”
We wanted this Sky launch brochure to evoke everything that’s exhilarating with driving a roadster, in particular, the feeling of open air, lots of space, and the view you’d have if you just looked up. We printed images of things you might find on a summertime drive on translucent pages, to create the sense of air, wind, and leaves passing overhead.
SATURN FULL LINE CARDS
Instead of a traditional bound catalog full of traditional car photography, we proposed an alternative: a deck of cards that people could basically customize however they wanted. Some of the 48 cards were quirkier than others, but each offered a little entertainment on one side, paired with a little information on the other. (Actually, quite a lot of information.) And they were all tabbed so they could be easily sorted and organized by model.
ION CAMPAIGN LAUNCH KIT
This launch kit was designed to show the various components of the ION campaign to Saturn retailers while also demonstrating the spirit and tone of this new model: “Have fun out there”. For the kit, we sealed the remnants of a road trip–all the things that usually end up stuffed into the glovebox or strewn across the floor mats–inside a compartmentalized vinyl folder. There was a definite learning curve in terms of the production–who knew the quarter would cause the sealing machine to arc?–but in the end it all worked out fine.
