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Campanie
JM
With a budget below 20k Euro, this campaign supported sales of 720k Euro for a BMW model which a BMW fan wouldn’t buy: the first front-wheel-drive, 3-cylinder car sold under this brand.

Our task was to launch the BMW 2 Series Active Tourer (AT) in Romania, building a bridgehead in the mainstream market for a brand with strong premium heritage. This was definitely a direct response, lead generation campaign. The launch was planned for the beginning of the year, a time of low auto communication and sales. Starting around 20k Euro, it played at the upper boundary of the mainstream segment. It did include premium features, but we needed to make it appealing enough to justify a stretched consumer budget.
General Information:
Strategy:
Strategy: As it launched in Q1 2019, the 2 Series AT came before the start of the Rabla program for auto renewal. At this time of the year, sales are low, but prospecting drivers are already exploring the market, according to our own research.

For a mainstream driver, brands such as Volkswagen and Renault are the usual choices. BMW was an unexpected presence in this segment. The brand’s aspirational values – sportiness, performance, agility – along with the lower price tag of this model could make it a best seller. But then again, the 2 Series AT stood out in BMW’s range by being more of a city car than a sporty star. So the bet was: could we capture existing demand for other brands and upsell the 2 Series AT as a superior mainstream proposition? Or would we be seen as overpriced or not BMW-ish enough?

Our strategy was to steal the start of the season, challenging drivers to shorten their purchase journeys and get the car they had dreamed of, instead of the car they had planned for.

In order to achieve this, we set up a consistent digital environment, enabling the 2 Series AT to be the hero of a wider audience, rather than a BMW outlier among core brand fans. The three major components taken into consideration were timing, targeting and creative.
1. Timing - Exploiting the fact that competition is the lowest in Q1 to maximize BMW’s share of voice and communicate its entry-level variant, at a time when drivers start to actively search and the Rabla auto renewal program isn’t on.
2. Targeting - Stepping out of the usual BMW communication territory in order to connect to upper mainstream drivers, which required extensive testing with new audiences, micro-management and quick reaction times.
3. Creative - It’s difficult to be a hero without being visually compelling. Our creative deck only included static assets. Knowing that a video would provide much better performance, our planning team decided to proactively develop an in-house creative solution.
Execution:
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