The microsite is navigated by voice: it’s intuitive and continually learning. The user interacts with the BMW i3 by clicking the microphone icon and speaking. It can answer any question about itself and most general knowledge questions. It always has an engaging response, or will perform a Google search, for the challenging questions. Content that relates to the topic of conversation appears on the screen.

To create the most human experience possible, we gave the BMW i3 a personality: it has a favourite actor; it sings and prefers to be taken for a test drive before it will marry you.

The microsite soft launched without a major media drive on the 3rd of March and has been live for 7 weeks. In that time the BMW i3 has been asked 12,000 questions generating an engagement score of 65% – just over two thirds of visitors actively engaged with the site. Despite test drives not being a key KPI, the site has delivered a conversion rate of 7% with 728 test drives booked: over 100 test drives per week. This proves that an online engagement campaign can generate sales.

When it comes to electric vehicles, South Africans are skeptical. While they have been very successful overseas, South Africans believe them to be expensive, sluggish, and given the energy crisis in our country, impractical.

In order to launch the new BMW i3 to this very unsure market, we had to find a unique way to address these issues and convince them that an electric car is not a sacrifice.

We wanted South Africans to connect to the i3 on an intelligent, intuitive and far more human level than any existing web experience can provide. Knowing that humans connect emotionally with other humans, we created a website that’s so intuitive it’s almost alive.

We created a web experience that educates using organic conversation. People can go onto the site and rather than navigate their way through another car brochure, they can actually ask the BMW i3 everything they want to know.