Q 2. Summary of the case study?

The case study, titled “Saturn Motor Corporation: Innovation in Channel

Strategy”, provides an account of the corporation’s history, mission, marketing
strategy, and its innovative channel strategy. The case reveals that the
company values customer satisfaction, and attempts to attain competitive
efficiencies through the integration of people, technology, and business
systems. The Saturn’s innovative channel marketing strategy is premised on
maintaining customer satisfaction, enhancing brand loyalty, developing
mutually beneficial distribution relationships with dealers or retailers, and
segmenting the market across key geographical areas. The corporation
depends on its innovative distributorship system to stay ahead of competition,
while strengthening its brand image in its single-minded focus to have
customers relate to the products and the company behind these products.

Consecutively, as has been suggested in the literature that the success of a

particular product or service rides on the quality of the channel strategy, it can
be argued that the success of the corporation rides on its channel’s ability to
allow retailers the opportunity to make contributions to key decisions affecting
them as well as customers.

Moving on, it is important to analyse how Saturn has been able to maintain
high customer satisfaction levels using its innovative channel strategy. Extant
literature demonstrates that the channel strategy establishes a strong link
between and among partners, leading to a powerful interlocking of strategies
which enables the parent organization to have a considerable presence in the
market.

The interlocking of strategies between and among Saturn’s retailers can be

observed in the way they market the brand as a single entity under the Saturn
flagship, how they follow the regulations as set out by the Corporation, and
how they set uniform performance standards against which they are to be
judged.

More importantly, the dealers are empowered by the parent company to

devise and implement their own unique customer convenience systems and
monthly order allotments to fit their individual sales and seasonal supplies.
These attributes, as well as the level of dealer independence in decision
making, provide the basis by which Saturn’s innovative channel strategy is
able to achieve competitive advantage and enhance customer satisfaction.