I was the joint Creative Director and Copywriter on BMW for 5 years. During that time I wrote every BMW ad for Australia and New Zealand.

Working on BMW introduced me to the power of Brand Values.

But BMW had an unusual way of using values.

They employed them not to say ‘who we are’ and ‘what we believe in’, like most brands and businesses do today.

BMW used Brand Values as the driving force of a strategy to attain market leadership.

The values they chose became the focus that guided and directed all aspects of their business – from car design and manufacture to advertising and marketing. 

In the luxury imported car category at the time, there were three strong brands.

Mercedes was the market leader.
Volvo held the second position.
And BMW came third.

Mercedes owned engineering, luxury and prestige. They represented the pinnacle of car ownership. A symbol of status and success for the proud owner.

Only considerably more expensive exotic cars like Porsche, Ferrari and Lamborghini held more prestige value. 

But due to their price and narrow appeal in terms of practicality, they had only small market share.

Mercedes’ position at the pinnacle of car ownership in Australia was considered unassailable.

However, the Mercedes brand had two disadvantages that had yet to affect their image in the market.

One was that owning a Mercedes was such an obvious choice as the badge of prestige. In a way, the badge was more important than the car.

Secondly, the company had leveraged the brand to the max. 

Imagine driving your brand new $300,000 plus top-of-the-line Benz and being stuck behind a common truck or bus emblazoned with the famous three pointed star.

Volvo, in second position, owned one powerful value. Safety. Volvo was considered the safest car on the road in the event of a serious accident.

The car was built around a ‘safety cage’ that encased the driver and passengers.

This feature had been heavily promoted for decades as the focus of Volvo’s advertising in Australia and internationally.

No one was going to wrestle safety away from Volvo. 

Especially as safety was top of mind for most car owners – a fact reinforced by graphic government campaigns on road safety in an attempt to reduce the national road toll.

The underlying sentiment was – if you have a family and care for their safety – you’ll drive a Volvo.

But Volvo’s safety focus did have a number of disadvantages. The safety cage made the cars heavy and boxy. They were considered unexciting to look at and drive. 

And Volvo drivers were widely regarded as, even ridiculed as, being overly conservative and cautious. A Volvo was considered the car for accountants, teachers, librarians and solicitors.

However, these disadvantages – in both fact and image – had little effect on Volvo’s strong market position.

Then, in the third spot, came BMW.

A brand with not quite the luxury/prestige value of a Mercedes, or the perceived safety advantages of a Volvo.

In market research at the time, BMW was widely described as “sporty little cars for upwardly mobile young men.”

Not a very powerful position to own. And not a brand image one could charge a premium for.

With this image, BMW was in danger of losing its market position to an emerging brand like Audi.

Alarm bells were ringing at BMW headquarters in Melbourne and Munich.

Little known to the rest of the market, the situation was soon to become more tenuous.

BMW were in the process of designing and building larger, more innovative, more powerful, more luxurious models.

A powerful new 7-Series and the first 8-Series car – an ultra-luxurious vehicle with a V12 engine and the world’s most advanced technology.

Both these models would elevate the pricing of BMW to a level that was beyond what the brand’s market image could sustain.

From a brand perception perspective, BMW had to be elevated upmarket fast. 

BMW, together with its advertising agencies, developed a highly competitive marketing strategy to combat this issue and turn
the situation to their advantage.

The strategy was built around four core values.

Quality
Performance
Technology
Exclusivity

Four quite rational values that led to an emotion-charged brand essence: 

Exhilaration.

These values seem simple enough, until one investigates the logic behind them. 

Quality: Not luxury à la Mercedes, but a dedication to creating and delivering the absolute best in every respect. 

Performance: A better performing car in regard to acceleration, steering, handling, maneuverability and stopping power is a safer car. BMW’s active safety (the mechanisms that prevent an accident) was arguably superior to Volvo’s and Mercedes’.

Technology: Mercedes owned engineering as a value, but BMW foresaw that technology would become a more prized value over time. They chose to focus more investment in technology. 

Exclusivity: Not prestige, a somewhat ephemeral value that could represent a psychological weakness, but the pleasure of owning and enjoying features that other car makers haven’t developed yet.

All of this was summed up in a brilliant and audacious tagline:
The ultimate driving machine.

Each word of this tagline reflects and supports one of the four BMW values.

The – Exclusivity
Ultimate – Quality
Driving – Performance
Machine – Technology

Part of the BMW response to the dominance of Mercedes Benz was to segment the driving market based on psychographics.

They adopted the view that Mercedes Benz is for people who like to be driven, whereas BMW is for people who like to drive – a notion reflected in “The ultimate driving machine” tagline.

Most car manufacturers spend at least 80% of their advertising budget on introducing new models and selling features. 20% or less is dedicated to the brand.

BMW reversed the 80:20 rule and invested 80% of their budget in brand elevation.

With this strategy, almost every BMW ad supported every BMW model.

And it makes perfect sense with the way people tend to go about purchasing a luxury car:

They buy the marque, not the model.

It’s basic psychology. 

The brand of car you choose – especially if your choice is not limited by budget – says a lot about your personality, self-image, taste level, confidence, desire for status, etc.

It influences the way you are perceived, how other people see you. 

It’s not just about the metal.

As already mentioned, the above strategic thinking guided all advertising for BMW in Australia.

The strategy was supported by a process of rigorous fact-finding that dug deep below the surface to unearth nuggets of information that gave proof to the brand’s product superiority. 

Of equal if not greater importance these facts provided ammunition for creating challenging and groundbreaking advertising.

The strategy also influenced media placement.

We’re talking about a time when digital marketing had not taken hold.

The media channels that held the most prestige value and captured the majority of the business audience in their more reflective moments were magazines such as Time and Bulletin and the quality newspapers’ weekend magazines such as the Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend and the Weekend Australian. 

The BMW strategy was to dominate the best positions in these publications. The first double page spread after the front cover. The centre spread. Or a high quality multi-page stitched-in insert.

In broadsheet newspapers, a dominating approach was to print a high quality, four page, full colour, broadsheet size insert.

Members of BMW’s potential market came to expect to see the brand in the very best media positions available, featuring high impact ads with intelligently crafted copy backed by intriguing facts, superb photography and art direction.

The advertising was the brand – and the brand was the advertising.

As the months rolled by, this advertising featured an extraordinary line up of new, larger, more stylish, more luxurious, more technically advanced models.

At the same time, BMW was also one of the first manufacturing companies globally to understand the potential of brand experience, or ‘living the brand’, and the power of immersing both customers and prospects in a BMW brand universe.

For example, in the dealership design, BMW explored each aspect of the design process by asking the question:

“If this (insert feature) was a BMW what would it be like?”

As all these factors converged, research showed that perceptions about BMW relative to its prestigious competitors were shifting.

And sales results soon followed.

Sometime around the first year of this strategy in action, BMW edged past Volvo into the number two market position.

By the third year, BMW had gained market leadership over the “unassailable” Mercedes Benz brand.

BMW held and consolidated this dominant role for the next two years.

Around this point, I left the advertising agency and was no longer privy to the latest consumer research, sales figures and insider information.

And to be honest, I needed a big long break from the auto category.

Not long after, I heard that the account was reassigned to another agency.

I soon noticed the standard of the strategic thinking and the quality of the creative work in BMW’s advertising took a sharp decline.

It appeared that the strategy that took BMW to market dominance was either abandoned, watered down, or simply poorly executed.

I assume the brand maintained its predominance for a while, but can only assume that its brand perception began to decay over time.

I’ve noticed that BMW advertising now tends to focus primarily on new model introduction. 

“Introducing the new BMW XXX.”

At the same time, Mercedes is consolidating their strengths with cleverly targeted and engagingly creative brand-focused advertising.

Current sales figures place Mercedes as clear market leader again, a good third above BMW in second place – proving the lion’s share goes to the leader.

Mercedes sales are growing steadily, while BMW sales are in decline. Volvo has slipped down the rankings, while Audi, now in third place, is edging ever closer to BMW.

To my mind, none of this is coincidental.

So the big question… Is success all about brand strategy? Is it the only determiner of a brand’s future position?

Of course not. But it can, and does, play a major role.