Why contrast approaches to theological education using Saab and Fine Cooking magazine?
Because in some ways there are no two products on the market today that better represent two very different approaches to their customers and their brand — and — while the language of business may seem alien if not hostile to the world of theological education, business behaviors around customer service and branding are roughly approximate to service and mission in theological education.
So what do Saab and Fine Cooking represent?
Well, if you have been reading the Wall Street Journal for the last year, you know that Saab is in serious trouble. General Motors was working desperately to sell it. In the eleventh hour GM finally unloaded the brand with a manufacturer of high-end sports cars. What will finally happen to Saab is hard to say. What is instructive is the way in which it reached this sad impasse.
Read those stories in the Journal and it becomes clear that these were the issues and this, roughly, was the story:
• Saab had a narrow appeal, catering primarily to professorial-types with corduroy jackets and elbow patches. (I had the jacket thirty years ago and the car twenty years ago.)
• That narrow appeal was based upon quirky, iconoclastic design — including a hood that opened from below the windshield and an ignition switch located on the floor — and the fact that it was Swedish.
• Saab failed to monitor the change in buying patterns and it failed to innovate, relying instead on the narrow appeal that quirkiness offered it.
• Ignoring the world around it did not work so well, so, Saab was sold to General Motors. That is, the need to innovate was ignored in favor of a partnership with a larger, struggling car manufacturer. This move effectively — and temporarily — masked its real problems.
• When the brand came under even more pressure, instead of innovating GM produced a Saab that looked much more like a GM, weakening even further its appeal to long-time Saab owners.
• So GM decided to invoke the car’s heritage (“Born from Jets”), instead of building something that drove like a jet. This, too, did not work and it didn’t help to know that after World War II Saab considered making a number of other things than cars — including toasters.
• By the time GM began to revisit at least a few of the brand’s more endearing qualities, Saab and GM were both in undeniable trouble — and corduroy jackets with elbow patches were hard to find.
• Throughout it all, Saabs continued to be plagued by issues of reliability and proved largely unresponsive to its customers. In other words they never built the car their customers wanted. They built the car they felt that their customers needed.
How Fine Cooking responded to changing circumstances, tomorrow. In the meantime I invite you to think about how much of what happens in a theological education could be compared with Saab.
Looking forward to tomorrow’s edition. As an owner of one of the last SAABs made before the brand was killed (hopefully not forever) by the sale to GM, the spiral downwards of the SAAB brand has been dismaying, to say the least. Telling, perhaps, that I have a MINI Cooper on order now and expect it to arrive any day.
MINI is making what the people want. And seems to me to have adopted the quirkiness factor vacated by SAAB.
Having not been to seminary (yet?), I’ll reflect upon the connection and wait eagerly to hear your thoughts about it.