Sports Utility Vehicles

 How To Put the Brakes on Their Five Major Marketing Mistakes

If you were to imagine an eNewsletter from BMW, you would probably expect it to lead off with a picture something like the one to the right. 

As a BMW owner, you tend to be a certain kind of person.  The folks at BMW have understood your persona well over decades in the United States.  That’s why I’m mystified at the June 2009 eNewsletter from Germain BMW of Naples.

I love my BMW.  I think Germain BMW is a terrific dealership. But, I hate their eNewsletter. Why? Because it has almost nothing to do with the BMW brand promise: BMW—The Ultimate Driving Machine. In fact, the eNewsletter is so bad, I can only imagine it must be a stealth product of the federal government’s new car Czar organization.

Call me crazy but when I get an eNewsletter that has something to do with BMW, I expect that it would deliver on that ‘ultimate driving machine’ brand promise.  Instead here’s what the eNewsletter delivers by way of core content after stripping away the header and some dealer specific webpage links:

What hits you in the face like a big wet fish are a big bunch of misguided elements which are made even worse when you add items from their table of contents:

• A giant RV–incase you’re tired of driving your BMW
• A big picture of watermelons that relates to keeping cool in Florida but has no car connection
• A treetop adventure story that doesn’t appear to involve any driving
• A feature on adopt a cat month(my baseless hunch is that BMW owners are dog people)
• More from the TOC
  • Lessons in longevity for the oldster demographic that BMW targets
  • Make your garden green–for the typical tree hugger BMW owner
  • A story on ice cream–who doesn’t associate BMWs and ice cream cones?

What was BMW thinking? Who were they targeting? What were they trying to accomplish? How could they go this far off track?  I don’t know. Perhaps, it will always remain a mystery.

Here’s what you can do to avoid the mistakes in this surprisingly bad eNewsletter.

• Make sure that your regular communications with your target customers match your brand promise.  Don’t wander off the ranch like BMW did.
• Make it clear to your target readers that you understand what is really important to them as it relates to the products and services you offer.
• Don’t squeeze so much content into an eNewsletter that nobody is likely to find the time to read it.
• If you feel that you want to combine both precisely targeted content with information that is less targeted, at least lead off with the stuff that aims directly at your ideal customers.
• If you have a strong local presence, don’t let your parent organization overwhelm what could be great local content with unfocused generic junk.

Effective marketing can be challenging. But, you don’t have to be a marketing rocket scientist to see how BMW went so far wrong—and how to learn from their goofs.