http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/some-pretty-insane-stunt-driving-bmw-canada-132451
I recently came across an article at Adfreak that showed some car stunts with BMW’s new M1 series, and it reminded me of how car companies will literally try any promotion method to associate their most expensive and powerful sport cars with madness and insanity. In this M1 video, the car went through a bunch of wall with holes small enough to just let a car pass through at high speed with difficult drifts. Other than M1, Audi also put their R8, the most prestige sport car in their brand, in both Iron Man movies. In the movie, R8 was involved in a lot of explosion and chase scenes, and unsurprisingly, over 20 R8s were destroyed during the filming. As a result, the image of breath-taking and insane situations for sport cars is definitely the product of over millions of dollars of investments.
With this marketing tactic, car companies are trying to target a specific kind of customers with their premium sport cars. When you see a man or a woman driving Audi R8, BMW M3 or Mercedes SLC, I bet you can almost picture the driver’s personality and attitude of life. Several adjectives such as daring, challenge-loving and adventurous, will immediately come to your mind when you try to describe these drivers’ personalities. And this is exactly what car companies are aiming for. They build a set of human traits around these sport cars with promotions, and thus car buyers will want to buy these cars to signal what kinds of person they are. These signals are so strong that a driver is even forced or propelled to change their characters to fit people’s general ideas about what kind of car drivers should be in a premium sport car.