Saepio

Marketing Asset Manager Case Study: BMW Motorrad USA

BMW Motorrad USA uses a Marketing Asset Management solution from Saepio Technologies to boost brand compliance, improve measurable return on marketing investment, eliminate repetitive tasks, enable speed-to-market and engage its distributed dealer network. The technology provides BMW dealerships with a single online resource for creating localized marketing materials while ensuring the corporate brand message remains consistent on all levels.

Background

While well known for its luxury/ performance vehicles, BMW actually has its roots in motorcycles beginning in 1923. Today BMW maintains a strong network of more than 140 dealerships across North America and consistently receives high marks for engineering excellence and quality. In fact, more than 50 percent of all BMW motorcycles ever produced still prowl roads around the world.

Challenge

After launching a redesigned product offensive to attract younger riders, BMW needed a better way to keep branding consistent and strong across its multi-brand motorcycle dealerships. While dealerships had the responsibility for creating and producing marketing materials, high corporate brand standards meant local dealers and their advertising agencies had to wait for approval each time a new piece was created. In addition, the need to frequently resize and alter materials was costly and inefficient for local dealerships.

Solution

The BMW Motorrad Local Ad Builder is powered by Saepio’s Marketing Asset Management platform, which combines digital asset management, collateral customization and marketing automation technologies in one, easy-to-use marketing storefront interface. The technology empowers dealers and their local ad agencies to tap into and modify BMW’s complete range of marketing assets including high resolution bike images, print and outdoor advertising, direct mail and in-store merchandising materials such as large format print pieces. This ensures BMW that its brand stand outs in dealerships offering multiple motorcycle brands.

Benefits

The BMW Motorrad Local Ad Builder makes the marketing process a “win-win” for BMW’s corporate marketing team and its local motorcycle dealerships. By storing current bike images in one central location, the BMW corporate marketing team maintains complete control of the brand and dramatically decreases the cost of supporting dealers’ advertising needs. Dealerships benefit from streamlined workflow process capabilities that include collateral customization, electronic approvals, ad resizing and file routing, all of which make the development of marketing assets easier and more cost effective.

Setting the Stage for Dealership Success

Like virtually all distributed marketers, BMW Motorrad USA wanted to gain more visibility for its motorcycles as well as to increase loyalty by its customers in the U.S. market. In order to reinforce and maintain the brand, BMW decided to beef up the marketing budgets allowed for its 140+ dealers across the country, and to provide them with a one-stop marketing resource.

Although BMW established a simple, on-line marketing resource using Saepio Technologies’ basic customization tool in 2004, the company asked Saepio to transform that existing portal into a more complete Marketing Asset Management (MAM) platform by 2006. The new technology provided dealers an enhanced set of benefits including:

• single-point access to current content
• speed-to-market for new content and campaigns
• compliance to brand standards
• cost savings for both BMW and its dealerships
• easy access to the full system for local ad agencies

“From a corporate perspective, we’ve benefited by having stronger brand control as well as by achieving big savings on both employee time and advertising costs,” said Laurence Kuykendall, advertising manager for BMW Motorrad USA.

The Road to Success

After the new MAM platform was launched, the activity from the dealers and their agencies increased dramatically – nearly 200 percent from 2006 to 2007.

“Providing easy access to resizable ads, the latest bike images, direct marketing materials and promotional content in one central location has allowed BMW Motorrad to take control of our national brand image, boost our image in the U.S. and streamline the co-op approval process for dealers,” Kuykendall said. “Our cost to support dealers has decreased dramatically.”

With Saepio’s simple-to-use yet powerful Marketing Asset Management solution at the core of the BMW Motorrad Local Ad Builder, BMW has accelerated brand standard compliance and leveraged its investment in marketing assets making the entire advertising process more efficient and cost-effective.