MaineBusiness.com

I don't understand why General Motors is shutting down the Saturn brand. To survive, GM and its Detroit competitors need to innovate, produce quality cars and reconnect with American drivers.

Saturn did all that. Especially the innovation.

I must confess that I drive an 11-year-old Saturn. It has 180,000 miles on it and averages 37 MPG in the summer. I've had to fix and replace brakes, alternators and belts. But I'm still on the original clutch.

So why does GM's future depend on dumping a car like this? Because GM didn't want it to succeed. That's the impression I get from this Forbes story on Saturn's demise.

The Saturn story looks like a successful experiment. But it's considered a failed brand. How can you incorporate innovation into your business and avoid making the same success mistakes?

Fully support your innovation. Saturn's no-haggling policy was a piece of marketing genius. It struck a chord with car buyers and remained the key impression of the brand among non-Saturn drivers. Key to making that policy work was a strategy that gave dealerships a geographical monopoly. The no-haggling could only work if car shoppers couldn't pit dealers against each other.

If your going to innovate your practices, you need to make sure everything changes. You can't continue practices that will sabotage your new idea.

Move quickly. It took six years to bring Saturn to market. And once it got started, it failed to develop new models. The economy model was great for introducing customers to the brand. But as its reputation grew, it failed to introduce higher end vehicles. Partly because sales were going well.

If you're innovating, you're in a changing market or industry. Otherwise there's no reason to change. So once you decide on a change, be ready to make it happen quickly. And after you succeed, you may have to continue changing because of the market. Especially if the competition reacts to your success by copying it.

Create space to be different. Saturn was an independent division that created new systems and labor agreement. This enabled it to learn from past mistakes and start fresh. For example, it's inventory system for replacement parts became the gold standard. This led to quicker repairs at dealerships and increased customer satisfaction. The system came from consultants' recommendations that GM executives had rejected.

You want to give your ideas space to succeed. That may mean dedicating people to the innovation. And they may need to create new procedures and practices to make it happen. It may lead to a new culture in the business. You need to give them the support and time needed to succeed.

Don't go too far. Despite successes, GM never bought into the Saturn way of doing business. By staying independent, Saturn executives weren't able to persuade GM execs that its work was valuable beyond sales figures.

Like I said, giving your innovation space may create a new culture. That is great. Except you may find yourself with two cultures in your business. This generates competition. That could be good unless the old culture feels threatened. It will fight back and refuse to accept lessons learned by your innovative culture.

Create community. Saturn wanted drivers to know that they weren't forgotten after the sale. Cookouts for drivers turned customers into loyal fans who believed Saturn was more than a car company.

This is a great way to make customers feel valued and invested in your business. But don't stop at warm and fuzzy feelings. Use that community to get feedback and improve customer service.

Be careful. You stand the chance of getting a lot positive feedback. Which is great. But it can overshadow problems and changing trends if you get the feeling that people love what you do. Why change?

Innovation never stops. You can't stop changing. Like I mentioned, Saturn was slow to introduce new models. Sales were strong, and customers loved their cars. Who would dare mess with that kind of success?

When you see an ad for investment services, you will notice a disclaimer that warns past performance is not an indicator of future performance. Those words should be on every sales report. You can't depend on success being constant. You need to keep an eye on trends and changes in the market.

While Saturn managed to change a lot about the car-owning experience (note that I didn't write the car-buying experience), it failed to change anything in GM. That was its biggest failure.