WHEN BMW WAS THE ULTIMATE PERSONALITY ALTERING MACHINE

“My teenage son said, ‘Dad, those BMW drivers think they own the road.’ I said ‘No, that’s not true son – they know they own the road!”

BMW of North America is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and is marking the occasion with 50 stories from its past 50 years. Chapter 34 of this celebration has just been released and is titled Joy is BMW: BMW Brand Advertising Goes Global. BMW asks “How do you define the essence of BMW? Is it what the car is, or what the car makes you feel?”

As Chapter 34 of the 50-part campaign points out, that question was at the heart of a controversy surrounding a 2010 BMW ad campaign that seemed to abandon BMW of North America’s longstanding “The Ultimate Driving Machine” tagline for the more nebulous “Joy is BMW”. Longtime fans were evidently outraged.

In a remarkable coincidence, that very same year of 2010, LA Car published an article on the results of a survey wherein we also asked BMW drivers about what the car makes you feel. But we phrased the question a little differently:

Are BMW Drivers A-Holes?

LA Car resident road runner Spinning Blue Propeller posed the question on several bulletin boards, including Bimmerfest, one of the most popular BMW bulletin boards on the Internet at the time. We prefaced the question with the following:

“If you drive a BMW, it’s pretty easy to develop a superiority complex. Let’s face it, BMW redefined the sport sedan category with the 2002 back in the 1960s. BMW sport sedans seem to win just about every other Car and Driver magazine comparison test. They’ve become a status symbol for the young, upwardly mobile professional. They are, after all, the Ultimate Driving Machines.” 

With this backdrop, Spinning Blue Propeller posed the question: Are BMW drivers A-holes? The answers from BMW drivers speak for themselves:

A lot are A-Hole Drivers. I am one too.

Bimmerfest’s Jimmy325 confessed, “A lot of BMW owner’s that I know are a-hole drivers. I am one too. I’ve driven with several as well. I try to take my a-hole-ness to the track in a more contained and safe-er (relatively speaking) environment. Nothing wrong with being an a-hole when not endangering other traffic on the road. Heeee.” 

Confessed Bimmerfest’s VanF, “I find when I am in my BMW, I do not truly break traffic laws, but I do bend the hell out of them!”

The 405 as a Bimmer’s Private Racing Track?

Mgorgel of Bimmerfest confided, “Well I have some friends that would qualify as a-holes. One friend has a new 7-Series and he uses the 405 as his private racing track, doing 100 mph and passing left and right flashing his lights (while driving with his fogs on). The other has an M3, and his average mph does not come under 70 mph. I drive very fast at times and pass left and right too, but I will always let the guy in the 5-Series go in front of me :^)”

Mgorgel continued, “Of course, BMW doesn’t have a monopoly on A-holes, and most are probably very courteous drivers. Several on the boards pointed to SUV drivers as being just as bad or worse.” 

Did the Brand Attract Personality Types, or Create Them?

Bimmerfest’s Bten lamented that he drives an SUV that happens to be a BMW. “Guess I (really) am one.” But, which came first? The chicken or the egg? 

Bimmerfest’s 1RADBMR wants to point out, “I definitely drive more aggressively, but I blame it on the car. Those who can, do…yada…yada…yada. Otherwise, I’m a really, really nice guy.” 

Petra from the Combustion Chamber testified: “Just this very afternoon, a Silver M3 pulled out near me in what was clearly a traffic violation, and proceeded to pass me at a tremendous pace shortly before stopping hurriedly so as not to miss the gas station he was headed to. Something inside me said at that moment, ‘Do people think that, just because they have 330 horsepower, they can drive dangerously?’” 

Added Petra, “Now that I think about it, I must come to the conclusion that not all M3 drivers are pricks, such as this one. But the BMW brand does seem to almost magnetically attract all types of pricks, jackasses and abusers of public roads, does it not?”

Meanwhile, Back at BMW’s Ad Campaign

BMW’s campaign in celebration of the 50th anniversary of BMW NA addresses this very subject, albeit with a tad more diplomacy. As previously mentioned, when BMW deviated from “The Ultimate Driving Machine” tagline for the more nebulous “Joy is BMW”, brand loyalists were up in arms. Here’s how BMW’s Jackie Jouret, the author of Chapter 34 of the 50-story celebration, put it:   

“To brand loyalists, and to BMW of North America’s marketing executives, The Ultimate Driving Machine was more than a mere ad slogan. Coined by Martin Puris in 1975, the phrase was at the heart of what they loved about the brand, a perfect expression of their emotions surrounding BMW.

By contrast, those in the marketing department at BMW AG in Munich preferred Aus Freude am Fahren, the German tagline coined by the Gramm & Grey agency of Dusseldorf in 1965. In 1975, BMW dropped the Aus, reducing the tagline to simply Freude am Fahren. That translates most directly to For the joy of driving, which became the British tagline Sheer Driving Pleasure and the French Le plaisir de conduire.

BMW AG tolerated The Ultimate Driving Machine nonetheless, at least while BMW of North America’s sales were skyrocketing in the late 1970s and 1980s. By the end of that decade, however, BMW NA’s sales began falling thanks to Deutschmark-dollar currency fluctuations and a fresh challenge from Lexus. That put new pressure on BMW NA to abandon The Ultimate Driving Machine tagline, as well as the Ammirati & Puris agency that created it.

Munich felt we needed fresh thinking in terms of advertising, and there was even a request of me to drop The Ultimate Driving Machine,” said Carl Flesher, then BMW NA’s Marketing Director. “I refused. I fought for Ammirati & Puris, saying they are an excellent agency, they have a feel for the brand, and advertising is not going to turn this business around. It’s got to be through product and pricing. They suggested we do the German thing, the Joy of Driving. I said, ‘I’m sorry, but the Joy of Driving just doesn’t land over here the way it does in Germany.’ It really is a linguistic issue.”

As BMW NA Media Communications Manager Patrick McKenna told Jouret, the “Joy is BMW” tagline was promoted by Jack Pitney, Vice President of Marketing for BMW of North America. “The idea was largely driven by Jack [Pitney],” McKenna told Jouret.. “It’s joy, and who doesn’t like joy? Who doesn’t like showing the human, emotional side of BMW?”

Jouret goes on to say the Joy is BMW ads drew sharp criticism within days of release. “The Wall Street Journal said that BMW had parked ‘the ultimate driving machine, at least for a while. The slogan still appears in the ads, but only in small print. Many of the ads also suggest cars aren’t what BMW is offering. The text reads, ‘At BMW, we don’t [just] make cars. We make joy.’”

A month after the Joy campaign got underway in the US, Jackie Jouret says he discussed it with Pitney at BMW of North America headquarters. “Pitney defended the campaign as an antidote of sorts to the popular perception not of BMW itself but of BMW drivers.”

The Ultimate Tagline Returns to Prominence

After BMW’s frolick with the BMW is Joy tagline, they came back to roost to Martin Puris’ 1975 great North American standard, The Ultimate Driving Machine. As Jouret concluded in the “Joy is BMW” Chapter of the 50-part series from BMW NA’s past 50 years: 

“BMW of North America put its advertising account up for review in 2018. The contract was awarded to San Francisco firm Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, which had made its reputation with the “Got milk?” campaign. Goodby, Silverstein knows a good tagline when it sees one, and the agency has left The Ultimate Driving Machine where it belongs, in a prominent position in every BMW ad.”

Bimmerfest’s VanF put it in a way that indelibly etches the message more clearly: 

“Before I was a BMW owner, I remember teaching my then teenage son to drive. We were on an interstate and a BMW passed us going very fast and cut in front of us as he passed us. My then teenage son said, ‘Dad, those BMW drivers think they own the road.’ I said ‘No, that’s not true son – they know they own the road!”

That Was Then. This is Now.

BMWs have come a long way from the wild west days of the sport sedan. The company has done a commendable job of maintaining its performance image, but one would be hard pressed to say today’s entire line brings out the inner A-hole in its drivers. In recent years, the line included everything from the humble, electric i3 city car to the full-size luxury SUV X7—the largest vehicle BMW ever built. According to Google AI, the median age of a BMW driver in North America is now 56 years old. 

Has the torch been passed to another car? As Bimmerfest’s Mgorgel previously argued, “Several on the boards pointed to SUV drivers as being just as bad or worse.” Some of my colleagues have singled out pickup truck drivers with lifted suspensions. On the other hand, electric car drivers are not impervious to this tendency, as any driver who messed with a testy Tesla Model 3 Performance will tell you. 

As for today’s ultimate personality altering machine? There are a couple of reviewers on our staff that will tell you the crown has temporarily gone to another car (see LA Car’s “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once In The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N”).

* You can read the full version of Jackie Jouret’s “Joy is BMW” chapter of the 50-story celebration of BMW of North America’s 50th anniversary here.