Pitching the BMW R1200GS - OEMs, Take Note

Making effective market communications in the motorcycle industry should be a relatively straight-forward and easy task. After all, motorcycles in North America and Europe have a strong personal component that revolves around self-expression and a rider personal identity. Making things easier, the motorcycle industry is littered with enthusiasts who themselves ride on a daily basis, and should understand this concept first-hand.

The idea that an ad or campaign should reach out and grab the intended consumer is not a novel concept, and motorcycle marketing professionals have their job simplified since they need only to develop and publish creative that would speak to them personally, in order to be successful. For whatever reason though, motorcycle industry marketers, by-in-large, were absent the day they taught marketing in business school…and it shows.

It is a subject I rail on about far too often, probably because it just simply baffles me how it occurs in the first place. How a motorcycle enthusiast fails to connect with people just like himself or herself boggles my mind, and yet it routinely happens in the motorcycle industry. However, every now and then, an OEM puts together something that renews my faith in the establishment, and for a split-second I have a vision that this whole two-wheeled thing isn’t going to hell in a hand basket. Such is the case with this promo video done by BMW TV.

No loud rock music. No quick-cuts. In fact, at no point do you even see a motorcyclist riding the 2012 BMW R1200GS. Instead we get a serious of shots of the R1200GS, parked in remote and exotic locations throughout Africa (Kenya if my eye serves me right). The message is clear: these are all the places you could go on this motorcycle. No technology jargon and no horsepower figures. Just the simple plucking of the aspirational string that tells us to get out of our urban drone life.

This is what real marketing looks like, and if you think they’re selling a motorcycle here, then you just failed the today’s midterm exam.