At the start of the new term we have been given a new project. This project we will have to find our target demographic, create a lifestyle board and then create the final promotional product.
For this assignment we (my partner and I) chose to concentrate on the BMW 325i. A model of the car is shown below.
Our main problem now is to find the user profile. We want to know who they are so we can design a product towards them.
Our first starting point was obviously the BMW website. We found a few commercials for the product and stats on the cars in question. We also found the price of the vehicle which was $94,900. We know by looking at other sites that people are willing to spend about a year and half’s income on a car. So concluded from this information that the demographic in question has a high net worth. Possibly an income of $70,000 a year or above.
We also decided that going to the BMW showroom in town would be a good starting point as well. We have yet to go there but we’ll probably go there together on the weekend or early next week. This would probably be a smart move on our part since they would know who the customers are.
We also had a look at car review magazines, men’s magazines and websites. We found a few sites such as “unique cars magazine” had reviews on the BMW 325i. On further investigation we found the magazine was a buy and sell car magazine. Which we concluded wouldn’t tell us much about our target audience.
We found an advertisement for BMW in the “men’s health” magazine.
We decided from this to have a look at the readership profile of the men’s health magazine. Obtain from a media kit site.
From here we able to establish some of our demographic. We know that BMW are targeting males and who are working full time. We also now know that they are in the AB socio economic. Which means they would have a tertiary degree and be working most likely in an office or another high paying job.
So far we have established for our demographic:
Sex: Male
Age: 18 – 34 yrs
Secondary School: Private Schooling
Education: Tertiary
Job: Office worker / manager
Income: High Net Worth
Health: Quite fit – training at least 3 times a week
Extra: Quite image conscious
We also found the same advertisement in GQ magazine which has a similar demographic. What we have now isn’t sufficient, it is however a start on painting a picture of the person we’re aiming for. We gained the extra information from reading the magazine. We found that most articles in the magazine were about looks, sex or cars – probably the three most important things to a man these days.
After a talk with the facilitator we decided to try and take a different approach. He talked about the change in marketing strategy with BMW in Europe. We talked about how BMW is the “Holden” car of Europe. We talked about how BMW use to market towards the older buyer rather than someone younger. We still have to research this but we were told that BMW had a huge emphasis on safety in later years. We were told that BMW could also be targeting the parents which would make sense, due to the recent years where young people are staying home with parents longer due to rising cost of leaving home. This is called “nesting” or “kippers” and is quite common these days in Australia.
We still have a lot of research to do it seems.
A few sites we found of interest:
http://www.bmweducation.co.uk
<--- site of interest because it goes into explantion of who BMW competitors are, safety etc in the UK.
http://www.bmw.com.au/scripts/main.asp?PageID=10682
http://www.topgear.com/drives/A4/XX/new/
http://www.topgear.com/blogs/drives/005-bmw-3-series-convertible/
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories/2006/06/stories/12/1.html
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