Fast cars. Hard Targets. BMW’s GKL vehicles retail between $100,000 and $200,000 – making them an ultra-luxury purchase for an affluent consumer. This audience exhibits lower engagement with brand communications, making them one of the hardest audiences to reach. We discovered a link between two distinct journeys, 33% of those shopping for a luxury car, are also shopping for a luxury home. Stage Your Driveway intercepts high net worth buyers on their purchase journey by literally embedding the BMW GKL vehicles into the luxury home buying experience, a completely new media approach.

BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Audi are in tight competition to woo high net worth individuals to their brands. Each of the three German luxury automotive manufacturers is focused on enhancing their brand experience for this segment and ensuring new, luxury buyers choose them. Efforts to further court this audience are fueled by near-luxury competitors such as Genesis punching above their weight, and luxury brands like Lamborghini making efforts to be more accessible.

Year-over-year buying trends show that there is an inverse correlation between how long a car buyer spends in-market– researching, being exposed to ads, test driving– and how high a price they are willing to pay for their next car. The ultra-luxury shopper is becoming ultra-elusive. This same audience exhibits lower engagement with brand communications making them one of the hardest audiences to reach.

Stage Your Driveway is a campaign focused on bringing more high net worth buyers into BMW.

With Stage Your Driveway we made BMW’s lineup an unexpected and welcome part of the home-buying journey by embedding ourselves where we knew our elusive high value prospects would be looking. We partnered with high-end real estate agency Heaps Estrin to put our high-end vehicles into multi-million-dollar listings. When a home was prepped and photographed, we staged the driveway with a brand new X7 or i8. So whenever someone visited an open house or saw a listing online, they were greeted by a brand-new luxury BMW.

Our challenge: How can we introduce the high-value target to our new ultra-luxury lineup if they’re actively avoiding new vehicle marketing?

We needed to find a new and efficient way to reach new people in the segment without negatively impacting our cost-per-lead. In mapping out the buying journey of this segment of drivers, we uncovered something interesting about their reasons for purchase. Google and Ipsos’ automotive research revealed that the majority of car purchases are prompted by a major life event. And for our luxury audience, 33% of those purchases start when they’re moving into a new home.

The luxury car buyer is a luxury home buyer.

Our strategy: Make BMW’s ultra-luxury lineup an unexpected and welcome part of the home-buying journey. To reach our high net-worth target, we would embed ourselves where we knew they would be looking.

Every driveway, a showroom.

We partnered with high-end real estate agency Heaps Estrin to embed our high-end vehicles into their multi-million-dollar listings. When a home was being prepped and photographed, we staged the driveway with a brand new X7, M5, or i8.

Every online listing, a BMW ad.

When home buyers visiting our listings browsed a photo gallery, they found a BMW in every exterior shot. We took a utilitarian part of the house buying process– the image carousel– and turned it into a new media channel, making our ultra-luxury lineup hard to miss.

Every open house, an opportunity.

Knowing that the areas around our homes were filled with high value leads, we turned each home listing into a geo-targeted, neighbourhood-specific ad designed to bring attention to our newly-staged driveways. Anyone who clicked one of our ads or inquired about our vehicle was put into contact with a BMW dealer.

A new way to reach our audience.

For the most part, this was a digitally driven campaign. We turned online real estate listings into online BMW ads. We used display and mobile display media to geo-target affluent neighbourhoods, and to reach likely luxury buyers. But the most meaningful and innovative activation took place in each of the driveways of the homes we worked with. Driveways became showrooms for our most valuable audience.

A significant drop in cost-per-lead.

Through our online lead-generation activity and in-person driveway showrooming we lowered our cost-per-lead for this class of vehicles by 56% and added a new pool of 37,000 prospects to our marketing efforts.

The essence of our campaign and strategy was built on a fresh and revealing data insight. After mapping out the buying journey of this segment of drivers, we uncovered something interesting about their reasons for purchase. Google research revealed that the majority of car purchases are prompted by a major life event. And for our luxury audience, 33% of those purchases start when they’re buying a new home.

This data insight was at the core of our creative idea, intercepting the luxury home purchasing journey with the BMW GKL line-up. A large part of this journey is done online, where we discovered a listing’s image carousels are one of the most important drivers in the online search. We intercepted this asset by including a BMW on the driveway. The results of this campaign clearly showcase the incredible impact of finding that one essential data insight.