BMW Canada
Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes

Case History
Marketing lore in Canada, and something close to marketing law in Germany, has it that a hard-headed, price quoting advertisement does not qualify as an image builder. Well, in our irreverent opinion, marketing lore exists to be broken – when needs be.

Instance: Rewind the time tape to the early Eighties. A brash young agency was flexing its creative muscles on a prestigious new account when the value of the Deutsch mark currency swung in Canada’s favour (and all of a sudden, a BMW cost only a few thousand dollars more than lesser wheels).

Q Group predecessor Norman Lowe Associates highlighted the fact with an advertisement laced with image-toting copy, but carrying the riveting headline: "Suddenly $15,000 doesn’t seem so much". To BMW lovers, indeed it didn’t. They flocked to showrooms cheque books in hand, so to speak. So much so that happy dealers across Canada urged, yea insisted, that the ad be repeated for the following year. With one change: Suddenly, the car cost $16,000. No matter, it was still a bargain.

The only unhappy people were marketing ideologues in BMW’s Munich HQ. They were most emphatic that price could not be the subject of an image advertisement. It was not “korrekt” – a word, it would seem, that is far more emphatic in meaning than is the English “correct”, i.e. something that is “not correct” may be frowned on; if it is not “korrekt” it is definitely not done. Anyway, our response was that dogma exists to be challenged – in a good cause, of course. Canadian management supported our view and the locals won the day. Though it could well be that Munich never forgave us; in similar circumstance we’d likely make the same kind of recommendation today.