On September 13th, 2009, BMW announced a new global marketing campaign.
General internet marketing rules dictate that campaigns, especially those from large companies on a global scale, generally require the purchase of any domain names that contain the name of the campaign. This makes it easy for customers to locate the product, as well as creating an easy to remember site for customers to visit.
Just to name a few: MasterCard’s Priceless , Burger King’s “Have It Your Way”, Gatorade’s Drink G2, Audi’s Truth In Engineering and the list is very long.
While the campaign is referenced here:
The BMW marketing team failed to secure the domain joyisbmw.com for this GLOBAL campaign. Though the reference, which even places a period at the end of the ‘Joy is BMW’ statement, just screams for the .com at the end of it, no special domain was purchased for the purpose of this campaign.
Following is the chain of events that I participated in:
1. On September 24th, a friend read the press release outlining the new BMW global campaign. Because he is a BMW fan, he wanted to learn more. Assuming the campaign website would be located at www.joyisbmw.com, he typed the URL into his browser only to find out that there was no site located at said address.
2. The same day, he purchased the domain joyisbmw.com which was available to the public and cost $8.00
3. On September 25th, I uploaded a single HTML page. The meta title and description was simply: ‘Joy is BMW’
4. A single link to the site was placed on my blog to http://www.joyisbmw.com with anchor text of “Joy is BMW”
5. On October 1st, a few days later, the single page site was ranking on the first page of Google results for the searched term ‘Joy is BMW’. It was located at
position #5.
6. The site has been up for seven days. In that week, the site received 41 visitors, most of whom visited directly by simply typing in the URL. Any other visitors entered the site via the search results from Google.
Is this marketing stupidity or what?
