Monthly Archives: June 2010

Joy is BMW – Marketing Innovation or Marketing Failure?

I came across the following video of a BMW advertising installation thanks to a tweet from Blogging Innovation contributor @RowanGibson and I think it serves as a perfect case study of how one firm – in this case BMW – can succeed and fail in utilizing some of the modern incremental innovations in the traditional marketing methods (including social media) to bond itself to an emotion – in this case ‘joy’.

First, watch the video, then we’ll examine where BMW has done well and where they have failed to harness the power of social media in creating the perception that ‘Joy is BMW’.

Successes:

1. BMW attempts to stake a claim to an emotion (joy) that no other car company is pursuing
2. The video has already had 115,000 views in one week
3. Lots of people are re-tweeting the video and including ‘BMW’ and ‘joy’ in their tweets on Twitter

Failures:

1. If you do a search on Google, Bing, or Yahoo! for “joy” – BMW is not in the top ten search results
2. Compounding this failure is that BMW is not doing any search engine marketing on the term “joy”
3. The startup video was herky-jerky after waiting a long time for it to load on the Joy is BMW page
4. The ‘Joy is BMW’ page is boring, not search engine friendly, and not social – there is no way for people to participate – no real value to the page
5. The 3D building projection event from Singapore is not featured on the ‘Joy is BMW’ page
6. There is no way for people to have conversations about the video (other than on YouTube)
7. BMW is not active on Twitter and makes no mention of Singapore event or ‘Joy is BMW’ campaign
8. No videos or photos related to ‘Joy is BMW’ on Facebook or mention of it by any of their 679,000+ fans
9. http://www.joyisbmw.com not purchased by BMW before launching the campaign
10. http://www.miseryisbmw.com also not purchased by BMW before launching the campaign

Unfortunately the failures list could be much longer, but I will stop here in the interest of brevity. The really sad thing about the ‘Joy is BMW’ campaign is that people want to be more social with BMW, they crave it, but they are not really being provided the opportunity.

To be honest, after watching the video of the experiential event I was expecting BMW to have created this forward-thinking integrated conversational marketing campaign to go with it, so imagine my surprise when the emperor’s new clothes fell off when I started looking around the social media universe.

BMW, there is still time to save the campaign. If you need some help (which it looks like you do), let me know and I’ll be happy to jump in, line up some great creative teams around the world, and knock out a great conversational marketing strategy to salvage the campaign.

What do you think? Has BMW blown a golden opportunity to go social with ‘Joy is BMW’?

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