Sports ACTIVITY Vehicle

So you're faced with launching a newly redesigned luxury SUV in a slowly shrinking, but very competitive market. Aside from building a car that just kicks the doors off of the competition, what's the best way to differentiate yourself - to ensure that when someone plunks down $50k+, it's on YOUR truck, rather than the competitor's?

BMW's answer? Create a new and exciting product category. In their case, when they went to launch their newly redesigned X5 and X3 SUV's, they didn't want to just release them as another SUV. A SUV is defined by Wikipedia as a type of passenger vehicle which combines the towing capability of a pickup truck with the passenger-carrying space of a station wagon. Sure, the X5 and X3 do that, but BMW wanted to get to the root of what made their trucks stand out.

It wasn't just the towing capacity and the storage space - every SUV has that, otherwise, not many would buy them. Instead of thinking in terms of features, they sought out the benefits of the trucks (marketing 101, right?). In short, they came up with the idea that SUVs allow you to participate in more activities than other vehicles. You can haul sports equipment in them, go on vacations with them, carry your friends and family in them, go off-roading in them, tow a boat in them. Pretty sweet deal if you live that kind of life. Luckily it just so happens that BMW's main TA are active affluent folks - folks that have the kind of money to do a lot of those activities. Neat how that works, isn't it?

From that idea, Sports Activity Vehicle was born. It doesn't hurt that BMW builds one hell of a good-looking and awesome-performing truck. But I have to imagine this strategy of promoting a different kind of truck will help make affluent men and women 30-60 salivate even harder and reach even deeper into their wallets than they would for any normal SUV.

Oh, and because I couldn't leave you with all these words and no eye-candy - enjoy the new X5 and below it, the X3:




















Garret