bmw motorcycles

“Harley-Davidson doesn’t belong in the same sentence with BMW,” said the CMO. But I knew BMW couldn’t speak softly over the roar of Harley’s branding engine…

HEADLINE: Eat this, fat boy.
BODY COPY: Chrome. Leather. Steel. Technology. Had enough?
TAGLINE: The Ultimate Riding Machine

Exec Summary
Category Thinking: Cruisers and BMW in same sentence!?

New Position: The ultimate sexy-fun riding machine.

Result: BMW’s successful launch into a totally new riding category (cruisers) in its 100-year history. Inroads into the lucrative, growing Cruiser market. And a successful marriage between BMW’s image of engineering/performance and a new sense of fun and glamour.

Full Case Study
Situation: BMW motorcycles were always seen as very serious machines. This was a good thing for the kind of high-performance, top-engineered motorcycles they’d been selling for 100 years. With the R1200C, they were attempting to enter for the first time the “Cruiser” category: a segment owned by Harley-Davidson with bikes like their famousFat Boy, devoted to bike enthusiasts who put looking great and sounding loud ahead of performance and engineering.

Category Thinking: Cruisers and BMW in same sentence!?

New Insight: BMW riders carry a secret torch for Harley and the Cruiser (low-riding “posing” bikes). Harley riders grudgingly respect BMW reliability and engineering. What if BMW alchemized the two fantasies of mind-blowing engineering and hot+heavy-metal sex appeal? What if they showed their own sexy-fun side and challenged the rebel in language very unGerman-like? The BMW rider secretly admired Harley for its sheer glamour, its beauty, even though he viewed it as “surface beauty” and incomparable to the real beauty of the near-perfection of a BMW bike. To have a glamorous “Harley” that was as exquisitely engineered as a BMW was a deep, repressed fantasy. On the other side, the Harley rider secretly desired his bike to be as reliable and high-performing as a BMW. Here was, for the first time in BMW’s history, a bike engineered to ride both fantasies. A cruiser that delivered on all emotional and rational cylinders.

Solution: Loosen up BMW and make a hairpin turn in tactics without skidding off the path of their 100-year success based on engineering superiority. Rethink the emotional connection between a BMW rider and the bike he said he shunned: the Harley (Fat Boy, its iconic model.) Communicate an edgy, fun attitude: “We’re glamorous, sexy fun, and oh, yeah, we’ll eat Harley’s lunch while they eat our dust.” In other words, give the Cruiser customer all the beauty and glamour he wants, but give him BMW’s legendary performance to boot.

New Position: The ultimate sexy-fun riding machine.

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