Despite best intentions, most automotive brands aren’t making the most of the rich customer data sitting dormant on their servers. Instead of using what we know about owners to pull them into compelling brand experiences, we prioritize transactional service reminders, aftersales offers, and eventually, a hard sell into their next vehicle. The cost to customer experience and loyalty is high. Our project leverages data’s powerful connective properties to turn a brand asset into a data source, locate that asset on road networks, then connect it all with true 1:1 modularity to the individuals who’ll find it most engaging.

THE POST-PURCHASE BUZZKILL

Buying a BMW is an exciting experience. Once customers receive their new vehicle, however, they can often feel a significant drop in brand love as the relationship changes from courtship to transactional, dominated by service reminders and aftersales messages. This critical part of the customer journey is notoriously difficult terrain for automotive marketers. And the stakes are high: as loyalty levels during ownership are a leading indicator for future purchase intent and overall lifetime value.

BRIEF

Engage current BMW owners with an experience-based program that deepens loyalty and excites fandom during the critical ownership phase of the customer journey.

OBJECTIVES

• Spark engagement among BMW owners and fans.

• Deepen the perceived value of ownership, a bellwether of loyalty and repeat purchase.

• Generate awareness and appreciation of an iconic (but under-penetrated) brand asset.

• Bolster BMW’s innovation credentials at a time of unprecedented category change (electrification).

A WINDOW INTO BRAND LOVE

Though not widely known, the rear window of a BMW contains powerful DNA to the brand’s originality and performance dynamics. If we could activate the Hofmeister Kink for modern audiences, we could deepen loyalty, stimulate joyful engagement, and have owners look again at their BMW with fresh eyes – reappraisal.

THE HOFMEISTER KINK

An AI-driven data visualization that turns a hidden-in-plain-sight design detail into a 1-to-1 drivable brand experience for owners and fans.

A NEW WAY TO EXPERIENCE THE BRAND

Although originally designed as a window shape, it turns out that Hofmeister Kink-shaped roads are also fantastic showcases for BMW’s legendary cornering abilities. In addition to revealing a key brand asset in the country’s landscape, our idea creates a new way to experience the brand, and helps owners and fans look at the roads around them with renewed excitement.

GATHERING DATA, TRAINING A MACHINE

Because the Hofmeister Kink has been expressed in many ways across years and models, our artificial intelligence needed to find a family of shapes. We started by cataloging images of every BMW model since 1962, then created vectorized versions of each model’s ‘Kink’. These 64 vectorized curves were the foundation for our synthetic training set (30,720 variant images), supported by Google Colab for machine learning and a neural framework, Darknet, for computation. Then we trained the model using a convolutional neural network, running detection on the +10-million-mile U.S. road network.

TRUE, DATA-ENABLED 1:1

If the general population discovers HofmesiterKink.com organically or through paid media, a BMW owner’s first experience of the site is more individualized, when they receive an email enabled by data in BMW’s owner ID records. These are rich, real-time datasheets containing owner name, model, year, household income, location and more.

DATA INTEGRATION

From the synthetic training set we built to introduce mathematical variation, the convolutional neural network for image analysis, the integration of the Mapbox API, the US road network TIGER/Line dataset, the stunning third-party satellite imagery, through to integration with BMW’s CRM systems, and eventual activation as 1:1 experience for the owners – the project makes powerful use of data’s naturally connective properties.

FOR THE DATA COMPLETISTS…

There were probably easier ways to find a few Hofmeister Kink-shaped roads. But we didn’t want to find a few. We wanted to find them all. And we wanted the data at the end of it all to be rich and connected. So throughout, we looked to maximize scalable solutions, and compatibility across datasets: geometric (shape) data connects to geographic data, which connects to satellite imagery, which connects to owner ID records, which connects to deeplinks for every Kink on our site.

DRIVER ACTIVATION AND ENGAGEMENT

• +10.8 million miles of road analyzed.

• 42% email open rate, more than double the industry average.

• 1.2 million BMW owners engaged directly.

• 30.5% of engagers were owners who had not engaged in the past year.

• 337% increase in mentions of the Hofmeister Kink post-campaign.

• 100s of social mentions expressing intention to drive Hofmeister Kink-shaped roads.

WILD BUT TRUE, PEOPLE ACTUALLY DO CARE THIS MUCH

BMW is a brand that inspires deep devotion among enthusiasts around the world. They gather on message boards, at auto shows, in driving clubs and on roads – obsessing over every detail of every model, stretching back to the company’s founding in 1916. Our project seeks to show more casual owners and fans how our superfans see the brand, while rewarding the loyalists with a platform that celebrates the design legacy as much as they do.