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January 2008 - Strategy Magazine
Who to watch

BMW's Web 2.0 efforts 1ntensify
John Cappella is the man behind BMW's biggest and youngest skewing launch to date: the 1 Series

by Annette Bourdeau
page 22

Talk about going out with a bang.

Before leaving his position as brand communications manager at Whitby,

Ont.-based BMW Group Canada to take on a new challenge within the company focusing on the retail side, John Cappella fine-tuned the biggest Canadian launch BMW has ever seen for the 1 Series. Expectations for the March launch are high, since the company has been on fire lately, seeing consistent growth for over a decade and holding the coveted top spot as the volume-leading luxury vehicle in Canada. In the first 10 months of 2007, BMW Canada was already up 18% over last year.

The new 1 Series model is the luxury automaker's first attempt at targeting a younger segment - 30 to 40, as opposed to its typical 40-to-50 range. Going after a younger cohort gave Cappella an opportunity to try a completely different marketing approach, including BMW Canada's first foray into

social marketing.

"Facebook is going to play a big role," says Cappella of the 1 Series campaign, which is just starting to roll out this month. He worked with Toronto-based agency Teehan + Lax on Facebook efforts like a contest that invites users to get their friends to virtually vote for them. When the effort wraps up in April, the top five users with the most votes will get to test drive the 1 Series on a closed course under the guidance of a professional driver.

"He's creating excitement about consumer drive events where people can experience the 1 Series in an exclusive arena," says boss Kevin Marcotte, BMW Canada's director of marketing. Because it's going after a younger target, the campaign will run fewer print ads than usual in favour of more online efforts aimed at driving traffic to a dedicated microsite, 1ntensity.ca. A cryptic teaser campaign began last month, with a prompt to join a "notevery1gets1t" mailing list on the main BMW Canada website. "It's intended to be a little mysterious. It's a brand new segment for us," says Cappella.

Cappella is no stranger to web-centric campaigns. He served as BMW Canada's manager, eBusiness, from 2002 to 2005, during which time he overhauled three websites in just two years - BMW.ca, Mini.ca and the retailer support site.

"He likes to operate fast. BMW sees speed as an advantage," says Marcotte, adding that Cappella's penchant for speed gels perfectly with a BMW mantra that came from former global CEO in Munich, Eberhard von Kuenheim, who once observed, 'It's not the big who eat the small, it's the fast who eat the slow.'

Cappella, whom Marcotte describes as a creative strategic thinker, was intent on using the web to strategically demonstrate BMW's benefits in a unique, engaging way at a time when many marketers still had bare-bones websites with lists of product attributes. "My first project was a challenge on the Mini side, to change the perception that it's not a good winter performer. We did online videos and testimonials," Cappella recalls. "Five years ago, a lot was changing in the online space. There was a great opportunity to move things forward."

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