Jun. 25, 2006 - Ultimate Marketing Machine
I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to the new BMW ads popping up in places like your favorite car magazine or cable channel, or more outré websites like www.theonion.com and www.flavorpill.net but I, your humble servant, has. Ushered in by the new marketing director who discovered that a whopping 75% of the people he had surveyed weren’t even considering a BMW for their next luxury class vehicle purchase, the new ads come from the Austin, Texas based ad agency GSD&M.
GSD&M is best known for their marketing campaigns for Wal-Mart, Southwest Airlines and Krsipy Kreme donuts. BMW’s new Vice President of Marketing, Jack Pitney came over from MINI.
The feeling is that BMW’s marketing has been too narrowly focused on the driving enthusiast by touting almost exclusively the performance aspects of BMWs. With new BMWs coming on line that are branching into areas where BMW has never been before, such as the X5 and X3 trucks, and a new minivan-like crossover car based SUV thing, Jack and company have decided it’s time to branch out the marketing theme as well. The 33 year old tagline “The Ultimate Driving Machine” is being given a rest in the search for a new class of customer, a class referred to by GSD&M as the “creative class.”
The creative class includes such people as artists, architects, engineers, writers, entertainers and scientists—people who use their creativity to solve the problems of their chosen professions. These people are believed to be early adopting trendsetters whom the rest of the hoi polloi will clamor to emulate. And thus the other 75% of people who do not find BMW on their radar yet will begin to see a blip as the hand sweeps round.
To a guy like me who sees the “Ultimate Driving Machine” as the best tagline and motto for a car company ever conceived this “creative class” marketing scheme sounds like nothing but mumbo jumbo wrapped in a $500 an hour consulting bill. But I’ve been wrong before—I couldn’t stand the evil rabbit “fast” ads or the truly terrible, almost offensive, mad German scientist ads for VW, and have since been told they worked. Not sure what class of people they were aiming for there.
At least some of the ads I’ve seen from BMW’s new collaboration with GSD&M are good, no matter what their reasoning may be. The first one that I saw is what I’ll call the “match the car company with the parent” print ad. It made the none-too-subtle point that, of all the high snoot car companies out there, BMW is the only independent one. Mercedes-Benz is beholden to the Daimler and Chrysler merger, Jaguar and Land Rover must ask permission from Ford, Lexus sprang from the loins of mother Toyota, and Audi is merely an offspring of the lowly People’s Car Company.
Another ad talks about creative risk by boldly highlighting the rear end of a new 7 Series—the design that shook the BMW world, and by the looks of the many me-too copies on the market today (the new Mercedes S-Class is a case in point), influenced car company design houses around the globe. I find this ad particularly funny because it not only pokes an exhaust pipe in the eye of the august motoring media; it also speaks to the letters section of the Roundel and all the amateur style police that write in their monthly Bangle grievances. It still doesn’t make that rear end look any better, but at least BMW is not shirking from it.
There are many more new style ads coming so be on the look out and see if you’re part of the creative class that BMW is looking for.
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