Engagement Marketing BMW style: MMS ads to sell winter tyres

This is certainly one of the best examples of a clever engagement marketing campaign this year. It is an MMS campaign, by BMW, in Germany. It was tightly targeted, timed, personalized - and yes - this was text-book engagement marketing. The story is covered in the new issue of MobiAd News and features part 2 of the interview of my friend Marc Mielau, the innovation manager for mobile marketing at BMW.

Here is how it worked. German winters require snow tyres. So if you bought a car in the summer months, you would have summer tyres on the car, and would need winter tyres. BMW had the required info on their recent customers, what car model, what wheel types, and could therefore figure out which winter tyre model would fit the car of any given customer. Best of all, they had the mobile phone numbers. Obviously BMW focused only on those cars that were sold that year between spring and autumn, because if the owner had had the BMW for more than a year, the owner would have bought winter tyres last year, for last winter..

So BMW designed an MMS campaign, where they customized the picture of the car to be the model of the car that the customer had, and the colour of the car, with the wheel rims that the customer had bought. Then BMW virtually fitted the suggested winter tyre for that car and wheel. And this image was to be sent to the customer.

So when do you buy winter tyres. Not when its the summer. But when it really starts to feel like winter. Because this was mobile, BMW had prepared the campaign, and waited for the exact right moment. The day the first snow started to fall in Germany, that was when the MMS messages went out.

And best of all, the MMS message included a link to come to BMW's mobile website, to select alternate tyres (and wheel rims) to upload to the tyre simulator, so that the customer could experiment with other variations and see their prices and compare.

How did it do? A conversion rate from messages sent, to actual tyre purchases made at registered BMW dealers, of 30%...   Excellent !!!   This is the future. Mobile marketing works in any industry, not only in selling ringing tones or voting for American Idol..   (and do remember, I have a Thought Piece for you on mobile advertising, if you want more examples. The 2 page document is not too long that any exec can find time to read it, but packed with stats and examples. Send me an email to  tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com and I'll send you the Thought Piece.

Comments

[Romi Parmar]

Tomi/BMW: Thanks so much for this wake up call to advertisers...

A bit of back of the envelope calculations tells me this marketing manager is going to get a bonus because i calculate the team there has just sold over $45 million of extras to existing customers via mobile.

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Cost of winter tyres about $700
Cost of tyres & rims about $2500
Approx. Average sale $1300
-
Total sales of BMW in summer 2008: 297k
-Those sold to hire/fleet: 180k
Total potential customers: 117k
30% response rate = 35,000 customers
---
35,000 customers spending $1300 each = $45,500,000
---

At a time when new car sales are falling (total number of cars sold in Germany during 2007 was 3,148,163 – the worst performance since the reunification of Germany in 1990) they will be looking to promote guys who can do that.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Romi

Thanks, great quick calculation of the scale involved. Yes, and all this at a cost of approx 50 cents US per MMS sent in Germany. So the total cost of the campaign (telecoms cost, not design and targeting which would be extra of course) is approx 60,000 dollars. And turn that into perhaps 45 million dollars of sales. Not bad, not bad at all..

Romi, I'll be using this case example in my presentations now this Autumn whenever I speak about advertising and mobile. I'll include the calculation and mention that it was you who offered the analysis here at our blog. So thank you Romi. I'm so sorry this came just too late to make it into my newest book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media... But yes, amazing numbers and I'll definitely use these in my presentations. Should wake up some people.. I'm also sure Alan will love these numbers and use them in his workshops around mobile marketing and advertising..

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Alan Moore]

Outstanding - Timely, relevant and contextual

Alan

[NWGuy]

Tomi,

Great example, once again. My guess is that the "extra" of design and targeting was larger than the direct cost of $60,000 for delivery but still a great deal.

Hopefully this sparks more creativity with personalization and targeting to open up the mobile ad front.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi NW Guy

Thanks ! Yeah, that cost structure is roughly what I'd think as well. Not a million, but not ten thousand, probably under 100,000...

Thanks.

Oh, I'm sure the BMW winter tyres campaign will be featured well in the industry; I'm talking about it in my workshops and seminars and I know many other thought-leaders really liked it, such as Russell Buckely the chairman of the Mobile Marketing Assoc so I'm sure you'll see it well spread..

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[mlgreen8753]

BMW ads are amazing. They must spend a lot of time testing their ad responses. I love the one posted at http://www.adwido.com/view_content?vkey=b07fc4a7a0e18f782c40d686de98ba87

[tyre changers]

A new form of advertising through mobile.I like the idea that customers can compare prices.Goodluck and hoping for more sales in the future.