Take Command of Your Brand

The explosive growth of Internet use over the last decade has opened the door for consumers to be more selective about the content they consume and the brands they patronize. At the same time, it has created significant challenges for marketers—both in setting new strategies for content development and distribution in the myriad of new media channels, and in communicating within a marketplace that has changed dramatically.

“Your target customer is not the typical John D., age 25 to 65 making $75k,” explains Tariq Khan, president of Global Diversity Marketing. “Companies without a well-defined strategy for baby boomers, multicultural, women, Gen X/Y and social marketing are not targeting 80 percent of America.”

Doing What Works
BMW, caught in the changing marketplace and in a challenging industry, allocated almost 50 percent of their $20 million “1-Series” campaign to online advertising and social media promotion. The goal was to effectively capture the attention of the target audience, made up of less-affluent 20- to 30-year-old professionals who would be interested in the new line of stripped-down sports coupes and sedans.

Extremely popular Facebook pages and interactive games allowed users to customize the make and color of the 1-Series, but they weren’t all BMW put on the table. Instead, the company smartly surrounded potential consumers with relevant content in various media. Among these were:

• BMW TV on YouTube and iTunes. By customizing a YouTube channel and offering the same content for download through iTunes, BMW made its videos about the 1-Series available to hundreds of millions of potential consumers. YouTube is the second-largest search engine worldwide (Google is the largest), and U.S. Internet users alone watch almost 200 million videos online each month. Replicating the content on iTunes not only introduces it to more viewers, but also allows those viewers to share the content with others offline.
  
  
• BMW on TED. The company’s Chief of Design, Chris Bangle, gave a presentation called “Great Cars as Art” in 2007, which was distributed through the extremely popular TED Talks. This helped to reinforce the company’s position as a thought leader as well as a product leader.