I adapted fairly quickly I have to say. The coffee was served in a stout little Pyrex glass slightly larger than a shot glass and left to cool momentarily. When it was cool enough not to cause blisters, but not so cold as to warrant further accusations of cross-dressing deviance, the coffee would be knocked back in one by heavily moustachioed hombres – much like a shot of vodka. No one was able to explain to me why exactly, but presumably the speed of consumption had a direct correlation to the enamel remaining on my teeth.

I followed this national custom from my second cup of Spanish coffee onwards and maintained the ritual for the following fortnight. My whole perception of coffee and the experience I had with it had changed overnight. It therefore struck me that coffee had ‘rebranded’ in Spain.

This wasn’t a cursory change of packaging or identity. It wasn’t a new flavour or a variation on an existing theme. The way people perceived the ‘brand’, the way the audience interacted with it and the expectations surrounding it were completely different. (Workmen having coffee and brandy at 9 O’clock in the morning for example…) I had to change how I thought about coffee in much the same way as companies wishing to rebrand their business need to change the thinking of their staff, customers and prospects. It was coffee, Jim, but not as we know it.

The importance of the discovery is not so much the drink as the state of mind. I have frequent conversations with B2B marketing professionals about their desire to ‘rebrand’. As the discussions progress, it transpires that they don’t want to ‘rebrand’ at all. They might like a new corporate identity, they may need help with messaging or positioning, they may be seeking creative change. All of which is admirable, but that’s not rebranding.

Rebranding a company involves cutting a swathe to the very heart of the business, discarding everything and anything no longer of any consequence and rebuilding perceptions based on a new centrally held belief (or a new understanding of a belief). That’s quite a tough thing to do. It’s easier to brand from scratch than it is to ‘rebrand’ – a blank canvas is easier to work with than one that first needs to be covered over. But that just makes the endeavour all the more worthwhile.

For brands to remain relevant over time, they have to evolve, change, reinvent, ‘rebrand’. Keep the good, throw out the bad. It’s not something that has to happen every year, but it should happen with significant shifts in the market, in personnel, in the business and in the audience.

As I watch B2B brands adjust to the digital marketing age, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that some are more attuned to the online needs of their audience than others. Some will evolve and navigate social spaces and mobile landscapes more easily and successfully than others. And some need to rebrand.

The trouble for B2B marketers in this shifting landscape, however, is knowing what to rebrand to. What do we say? What do we do? What do our customers want? What central brand belief do we retain and how much do we dispose of?

Whatever the uncertainty, take heart from Spanish coffee. If the spectrum for coffee brand acceptability, and indeed popularity, is anywhere from a whipped cream and marshmallow topped mocha latte at a Covent Garden ‘Java Emporium’, to the shite they drink out of a glass in the backstreet, semi-derelict cafes in Spain, well, at least there’s hope. The real challenge is accepting the need for change and knocking it back. ¡Salud.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

I felt like a gunslinger walking into the saloon where the conversation stops and the piano player dives behind the bar. The safety catch was off. I now had a choice. I could back out the door slowly and hope I made it to my horse before my mouth started firing random abuse, or I could slug it out. Sometimes I wish I could just, you know, ‘not’. But there we are…

The red mist welled up and all I can really remember is that I didn’t jab my finger in anyone’s face. I saw an interview with Bill Clinton once where he said that in heated debate, it was essential not to point fingers as the gesture was overly aggressive. Clinton used his thumb which, apparently, is politically correct. So there I was, purple faced, neck vein bulging, spraying spittle across a good metre and a half of conference table as I ranted uncontrollably and all I could think of was, “It’s Ok Scot, it doesn’t matter what names you’re calling him, you’re not pointing, you’re using your thumb. All is well.”

All was in fact very far indeed from ‘well’. It was unacceptable in my opinion that a two billion dollar company should ask a number of small agencies for their unpaid responses to their brief and then move the goalposts from ‘awareness’ to ‘value proposition’. I was particularly incandescent because this was at least the second time this particular client (I use the term loosely) had shape-shifted mid stroke. 18 months earlier the brief had been for a (expressly and specifically) “radical and creative brand strategy.” That’s what I delivered. Turns out my proposal was “too radical…” and, “too creative…” The agency appointed was, “safe, with a process.” Safe it may well have been, but the client had seemingly spent 18 months producing a brand strategy with a worthless proposition and decided that the best time to be disappointed at my lack of telepathy skills was after I had presented the requested brand awareness campaign. Tisk.

At some undefined point, my spleen was fully vented and a stunned silence reigned. (There was still a wild howling in my ears of course, but for the most part, the room was quiet.) I packed up my things, and, with the surprising absence of ‘any further questions’, I left.

He called me the following day. I’m still not sure why. Apparently, “it’s important to follow these things up.” Well, no, it isn’t. Everything had been said. It turns out he still thought he was right and just wanted another fight. I nearly gave it to him too. But as the red mist rose, I caught myself, took a deep breath and simply said, “Look, you’re worth nothing to me. You’ve been worth nothing for years and you’ll never be worth anything. You’re a drain on my resources and my energy. I can apply both to considerably better commercial advantage elsewhere. The conversation’s over. Goodbye.” And I hung up.

It’s possible I was wrong. It’s possible that the work didn’t answer the brief. It’s even possible that it just wasn’t good enough. But that’s not the point. The point, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is that you have to believe. Not a little, not a lot. You have to BELIEVE with every single fibre in your body. Because no one else will. Least of all the client. Believe it, live it and hang up on any mutthafuggah who isn’t prepared to die for the cause.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

My reluctance to take the stage and wave my arms around in a passionate display of mobile affection wasn’t so much the fear of defeat (and the motion was squarely defeated…), it was more a response to the depressing realisation that the B2B industry is catastrophically unable to respond quickly to game-changing shifts in market development.

I sat in the front row and listened to the argument against the importance of mobile and, if you were there, the person snorting and spluttering, unsure whether to laugh or cry, was me. In the panel discussion following the formal debate someone ‘rested their case’ with the comment, “Ask yourself this, if you’ve just been told that your budget’s going to be cut by 25%, what would you do without? – Yeah, [pause for effect] mobile.” The comment (and the vote) highlights the staggering degree of ignorance about mobile technology in the B2B space.

A better question would have been, “If your budget was cut by 90% and you only had 10% left to play with, what is the single most essential activity that will deliver the highest returns in the next 12 months?” Yeah, mobile. Idiots.

“I don’t want people to have my mobile number” was one comment from the floor. “I don’t want more spam texts or unsolicited calls on my mobile” was another. Is that really the extent of understanding of the mobile platform? Has the B2B industry again failed to grasp the significance of social empowerment, this time in a mobile context?

No one is talking about SMS. No one is talking about telemarketing. That was the 1990s. It’s now 2010. ‘Push’ marketing pretty much died, fairly quickly, but painfully, with the advent of Social Media. That’s the thing that changed the world of communications forever – you know, the thing that has transformed Facebook into the equivalent size of the world’s third largest country.

What does that have to do with B2B? Well, irrespective of budget cuts, we can barely afford to push even if we wanted to. We have to ‘pull’ social-savvy audiences towards our products and services. If we do nothing else, we should ensure information is accessible when customers come looking for it. Richard Robinson, Industry Head of Business Markets at Google said in the debate, that mobile traffic has increased over 600% in the last year. Your customers use their mobile devices to access and request information online. No one heard that of course, because they were worried about unwanted SMS messages…

Your customers want to use their mobile devices – SmartPhones, NetBooks, Tablets – to access content (your content) when it’s convenient to them, which is hardly ever whilst they’re sitting at their desks. They want to see your content at the airport, on the train, in a coffee shop, on the street, while they’re waiting for something else, whenever they have a spare moment.

Now reach for your mobile (it’ll be right next to you) and punch in the URL for your own brand’s website and have a look at how well your company content performs on a 3” screen. It’s not good is it? Would you spend time engaging with your brand in that context? No, you wouldn’t. So why should your customers? It’s not even a difficult (or budget-breaking) problem to solve. Mobestar, who also spoke in the debate, can fix most mobile content delivery with a simple technology nip and tuck. If you do nothing else in the next 12 months, fix your content for mobile delivery – you can do it with one call, from your mobile. And if you don’t, just remember that your customers are already engaging with those that have. Ok, now you can vote.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

My Flight was booked with BA. Any organisation that you enlist to carry you and your loved ones at a height of thirty thousand feet has to have a trustworthy and reliable brand. Despite industrial action a few days prior to our departure, our outward flight was unaffected and we had a great 2 week vacation.

The morning that we were due to fly back, my wife received an email from BA announcing that the Flight was cancelled due to the volcano. Not ideal, but at least we received the email. It offered no details about the eruptions, but gave 2 phone numbers (in the US and the UK) and directed customers to rebook their flights on the BA website. That was the ‘ordinary’ response to a cancelled flight but BA clearly didn’t have a plan for ‘extraordinary’ – certainly not one that they were able to share with me.

So with British airspace out of bounds, we were on our own and, basically, screwed. The BA website wouldn’t allow us to change flights and, contrary to the email, the website continued to show our flight as confirmed and checked-in. The UK number simply didn’t work and the US number provided an automated service to nowhere followed, intermittently, by a call-holding system. I’m not sure when the last time you were ‘on hold’ for 2 hours was, but you’ll appreciate that with two small kids in the room, a wife doing her nut and housekeeping banging on the door, it’s not good.

During the 13½  hours it took to get through to the call centre, and the subsequent eight days I had to wait in Phoenix for the return flight, I had time to reflect on the power of brand perception. My considered wisdom is this – it’s all in the mind. BA has spent millions persuading me to trust BA in preference to other brands. It worked, because that’s what I did. But it’s when the shit hits the fan that you really need to manage customer perception and brand reputation. Reputations that have taken years to build can be blown in an instant. Or 13½ hours.

I have no doubt that in the UK, the volcano, the closure of British airspace and the impact on the beleaguered BA share price was daily front page news, but in ‘Pleasant Valley’ Arizona (really) I think it would be fair to say no one gave a shit. I relied on web news, CNN, Twitter, texts and email from friends and colleagues. The news was patchy and unreliable (often conflicting) but it was better than nothing, which is exactly what I received from BA. BA is the one brand that I should have been able to rely on for relevant, timely and accurate customer information. Oops.

The very reason that companies invest in their brands and the supporting digital channels of communication is to shape perceptions in the minds of their audiences. Brands aren’t ‘things’, brands are what people, customers, ‘think’. Brands are the experiences people have and the stories, like this one, they tell other people. In our digital world, those stories can travel a long way. Further than Pleasant Valley. BA fundamentally failed to manage my customer experience and, in the absence of any other input, they have allowed me to form my own perceptions of the brand. So that’s what I’ve done. My perception of the BA brand is now permanently and indelibly etched in my mind.

Does BA still have a brand? Yes, but it no longer has the value or values that are important to me. The trust is gone and without it… well, a plane ticket I can buy from anyone.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

She called me the other day. After 20 years. Sue was a Marketing Assistant client of mine back then and I was, well, a young legend in the making. She’s now the Managing Director of a new market research company called Brownsauce and she was hoping to use her contacts to extend the network for her business. We met, we talked, we told each other that we didn’t look any older that we did 20 years ago and we laughed. We compared notes between her B2C experience and my B2B observations and we found a good degree in common.

I asked Sue how she had found me. “Easy,” she said, “I Googled you, then looked you up on Linkedin.”

And it struck me that digital isn’t our future anymore, it’s now an intrinsic part of our daily (working) lives. We can look to the future, but it’s pretty much already here. We use search engines and database applications and tools to become and/or to remain visible to the world – websites, blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. Even if we don’t use them, the machine, the ‘matrix’ indexes the information anyway. There is no escape. So is it scary or is it exciting? Or is it just ‘there’ – to make of what we will?

It’s all of those things. From a brand perspective, it’s an opportunity. B2B clients and prospects still remain ’amazed’ at the proposals and possibilities for creative digital branding and yet, frustratingly, they also remain conservative in their willingness to trial or adopt these new strategies to amplify their brands online. If I’m honest, I’m amazed by some of this shit too. Almost daily actually. But that’s not about to stop me seizing the opportunity to force my brand down the digital pipeline in order to be ‘found’ at every available opportunity. How we apply our brand strategy using digital channels is very different to simply having a brand strategy.

But being ‘found’ is just the start. If the brand is ‘a perception in the mind of an audience’ (as opposed to a logo or ‘badge’), then the brand can be shaped any which way in an online environment. The digital environment can be a great leveller – where the smallest of brands has every chance of competing head to head with much larger companies. In the last couple of months alone, I’ve discussed the usual suspects with clients – websites, email, SEO – but I’ve also discussed the wider, more creative opportunities to drive their B2B brands online. YouTube broadcast channels, interactive content hubs, geo-positioning mapping overlays, content aggregation enhancement – you know, weird shit. They look at me like I’m totally insane.

Sure, they all get excited – because it’s exciting stuff. They sit and make notes and nod and smile and, in some cases, get very fired up about where the future may take their brand. But however exciting the future could be, the limited budget is almost always spent on what is probable and known rather than what might be possible, and unknown.

The fear of the unknown is therefore an anchor on the business. I’ve been called worse of course, but a complete and utter anchor (on the business) I am most certainly not. I am the evangelist. It’s as close as I get to angelic. I figure that if we all use digital channels effectively to pull audiences towards the brand, people will still want to be part of the experience 20 years later. And so, in the case of Sue Barnes, it would appear. The moral, therefore, is – if you still expect your brand to have pulling power in 20 years, you need to look after it. A bit like your teeth. But digital.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

Well, I for one, am bored. I’m bored telling companies that they have to actively engage with social media for their brand to remain relevant in a digital economy and I’m bored listening to agencies pretending they have measurement matrices that prove they know what the customer’s doing and what the customer’s going to do next. They don’t. They predict. We can all predict. Here’s the thing – I predict that whatever you predict, the customer’s going to make up their own mind and do the thing that you didn’t predict. See? Boring. And it all completely misses the point of social media.

The clue’s in the name. It’s ‘social media’. The B2B opportunity is for brands to engage ‘socially’ with their customers, get closer to them, bring them closer to the brand, maybe positively influence perception and that’s it. Why does there have to be any more? Why do we need tracking tools and pipeline funnels and conversion ratios and stepped process drivers and sequential interaction protocols? Why, as part of a broader brand strategy, can’t our brands just be… social? Why can’t we have a, wait for it… a brand personality? And why have we lost sight of the fact that social media became popular for the very reason that our customers were trying to escape the corporate machine?

So. Instead of a case study, with ROI and BORING things, here’s a story. Brands are, after all, stories – living, breathing, social stories. I wrote recently about my mobile parking experiences. If you missed that memo, you can find it here. It’s a reasonable blog I think. There’s a good guy, a bad guy, triumph over adversity and a happy ending. I referenced the positive and creditable attributes of RingGo as a mobile parking service provider. No biggie. I posted and went back to work.

Two days later there was a letter on my desk. Not an email. A letter. You can read what it said here. The next day RingGo found me on Twitter and started following me as well as saying very nice things about me and my brand and the post I had made. I followed RingGo back. Then I received a lengthy email from RingGo’s Marketing Manager (which she was enthusiastic enough to spend her Saturday night writing). And we’ll stay connected on LinkedIn.

I don’t ‘know’ these people. I haven’t tried to ‘sell’ anything. They’re not part of any ‘process’. We’re just being social. I feel reasonably confident they’ll be saying nice things about their experience with my brand just as I really enjoy telling this story. I know for a fact that friends of mine now use the RingGo mobile parking service because I’ve told them it’s great (and I told the world). One day, the phone will ring and someone will say RingGo suggested they call me. That’s the point of social media. It’s no more complicated than that. You can talk about it some more and wait for the measurement statistics if you insist, but from now on, I just want to help the brands that are prepared to actually do it. Talk to the Facebook page ‘cos the hand ain’t listening.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

The other day, however, I was caught short. Being able to muster only £4.50 of the requisite £5.50, I was forced to concede and call the parking hotline. Imagine my surprise when I completed the entire registration and parking transaction in less than two minutes – entirely without defaulting to ‘operator assistance’. RingGo has the best voice recognition system and user experience I have ever encountered on a phone. I was so impressed, I did it again a few days later from a different station and I audibly squeaked with excitement when the automated voice recognised me, my car and my new location using geo-positioning on my mobile. I simply confirmed and was on my way, barely breaking stride.

I assumed that every mobile transaction would be as simple – or at least when I parked my car. Oh no. Why on earth would life be that simple? Having been lured into mobile voice transactions, I returned to my normal car park and decided I should embrace the change that mobile transactions could enable. But this was a different system. It didn’t have voice recognition, it wasn’t a seamless, intuitive process and it didn’t work. It wasn’t RingGo. I had to punch out every letter of my number plate, and my credit card, and my address. The menu system was appalling and just as I neared the end of the registration torture I was kicked out of the system. 12 times. Oh, how I laughed…

If there had been a mobile internet application, the whole transaction could have been so much easier. With a quick click and a couple of swipes the job would have been done. But of course, mobile internet ‘app culture’ has just arrived, or, more accurately, is just arriving. Which means there’s an opportunity, and a danger, for brands engaging in the mobile space.

The opportunity is to get it right. I didn’t just buy a ticket the first time I used my phone to pay for parking, I bought a mobile experience. It was one that worked initially, and then I discovered I had to be selective about the brands that I trusted for mobile engagement. If it says RingGo on the parking sign, I can trust it. RingGo is good, their competitors are shit. Had I tried the crap system first, I would have stuck to coins. The same is true of any other mobile experience. It will be important to make sure that the online brand experience we have created for our audiences actually works on mobile.

How, for example, does your glorious new corporate website perform and engage your audience on a three inch mobile phone screen? Mmmm. That part’s easily fixed, but beyond WAP enablement and iPhone apps, there’s a world of mobile that everyone’s using, except the B2B marketing community. As we increasingly migrate our business communications to mobile devices, it’s going to be important to distinguish between the brands that can migrate seamlessly, and those left standing around in the car park jiggling the loose change in their pockets. Let’s hope it’s loose change at least.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

“This Summer I had to, you know, get away from everything and everyone and do some growing up. So I made a movie called ‘The Last Song,’ and it was so totally the best thing I’ve ever done. I hope you enjoy it,” she husked. I realised at that point that I’d just been branded.

Miley disappeared and we were all ‘treated’ to a trailer of her new movie on the giant screens. I wasn’t sure I approved. It was like being at a movie theatre instead of a gig. An expensive, noisy, 23,000 seater movie theatre. Nonetheless, we sat there and watched a trailer at a live concert. Everyone clapped and the screaming never actually stopped, but I still wasn’t sure.

Whilst the trailer played on the centre screen, the side screens displayed graphics of the movie logo and the website address – Lastsongmovie.com. Miley came back onstage, sang a song from the movie (presumably the last song) and the crowd went wild.

So what’s the problem? Well, I understand merchandising and promotion. I believe I still have a treasured Thin Lizzy t-shirt from the 1983 Thunder and Lightning Tour that I’ve saved for special. So that’s not the problem. The problem was the line. It felt like it had been crossed – ‘Good Lord! Promoting her movie in the middle of a concert? Outrageous! That’s not what I’m used to. Whatever next…etc.’

My reaction felt familiar and I needed to pinpoint it. I’m pleased to announce (without a trailer) that I’ve remembered where the unease came from. It’s how I felt some years ago when a pimply-nerdy-geek-type told me that traditional B2B communications were dead and that the future was digital. I guffawed, spluttered and muttered outrageousnesses then lay down in a darkened room to sniff some well earned printed collateral. But just because you don’t like it or are unfamiliar with the territory, doesn’t mean it isn’t so.

I’ve had to move at speed in the last couple of years of digital development just to keep up. There are some home truths about online brands that every B2B marketer needs to face, and at the moment, they’re not.

At the recent B2B Marketing Conference I proposed the debate, ‘This house believes that traditional B2B communications are dead. Brands must migrate to digital or face the same fate.’ Despite a compelling rationale, I was roundly thrashed in the voting. I surveyed the audience and, to my surprise, some of the faces looked pretty outraged. How very dare I even suggest that digital will replace the communications that they’ve relied on so stoically for the last decade or more? I had just crossed the line.

But even at a Miley Cyrus gig, the channel of communication was digital. The trailer directed me to www.lastsongmovie.com. I accessed the site using my iPhone and was pointed towards a Facebook page and encouraged to follow the movie on Twitter – all digital.

I mentioned the differences between traditional concerts and the multi-channel, multi-media digital experience of the Miley gig to my nine year old daughter. She shrugged in a completely passive, assumptive way and said simply, “Come on Dad, it’s 2009, what did you expect?” I can’t be sure, but I suspect my face looked very similar to those I saw in the crowd at the B2B Conference.

The line has moved. Expectations have changed. We will all ultimately become old farts and die. The question is how quickly you want to realise that fate. Personally, I left the gig a far hipper father than I went in. Digital, like, so totally rocks. Dude.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

My wife has already banned me from holding it when I’m talking to her because, apparently, I’m more interested in the content on my phone. She actually hides it when we have visitors to the house because, “Sitting on the sofa with your phone and grunting occasionally does not count as joining the conversation…” Of course, I am actually fully engaged in the conversation, just not hers.

So, whilst clearly not first to the bar at the SmartPhone party, I find myself fully committed to the future of mobile internet delivery. It’s an area of the marketing mix that has been woefully underexploited in the business community, but it’s OK, you can relax, I’m going to fix that.

Having started to explore the opportunity, it came as no real surprise that users’ appetite for mobile content is far more advanced than brands’ understanding of the technology and capabilities, or limitations. Despite the Credit Crunch, over 40 million G3 Smartphone devices had been sold worldwide at the end of 2008 with some of the top manufacturers still posting sales growth of over 80% pa. Whilst the recession may be hurting large parts of the global economy, the mobile market is growing – at speed.

And yet businesses have failed to capitalise on the ability to deliver their digital content to this rapidly growing mobile audience in anything like a compelling way. If I want to access a website from my phone (and I do, all the time…) I can do it, but the experience sucks. On a 3×2” screen, I really don’t care about your flash animations and your searchable, keyword heavy content that appears in 0.05 point type with fifteen dropdown navigation tabs that I can’t read. I couldn’t be arsed to pinch and slide and zoom and scroll – I want and need better delivery of your content on my mobile device if I’m going to engage with your brand. And I’m not the only one. There are 39.99m others who would like a better experience too.

In the next couple of years, I predict an explosion in the development of website content for mobiles. It started with, “There’s an app for that…” where iPhone users could enjoy bespoke applications, easily accessed, with simple, intuitive functionality, but fell short when links from the app led straight back to standard web page content on the main brand website. That needs to change. We need to differentiate between static delivery of web content (large format screens), and mobile devices (SmartPhones, NetBooks, PDAs). The difference is obviously the size, but also the needs of the audience using the device and the environment in which they are using them. Speed, clarity and simplicity of content will reward the brands who move boldly into this space with the customer attention that they need to secure.

Options at the moment, however, are limited. But that’s the opportunity. Brands can use their own IT department to deliver mobile internet (the BBC has made a good job of it) but it takes time, costs are high and it may not work across all mobile platforms. Or they can tap into the expertise of others – Mobestar is my favourite. Mobestar’s mLite suite is, “…the first packaged product to automate mobile website production.” I liked it so much, I joined the company. Far from being a sheep and following the herd then, I believe I’m actually leading the pack. So flock ewe.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666

I liked my 330d so much, I’ve been driving it for the last 5 years. It’s covered 75 thousand almost trouble-free miles, but it was just time to change it. So I walked in to a BWM showroom a couple of months ago and tried to buy a new one. Easier said than done. Try as I might to part with several tens of thousands of pounds, I just couldn’t get the salesman to realise that I was ready to pay the cash equivalent of a small neighbourhood in certain parts of Manchester. He just wanted to make me have a test drive in something I had no need of testing. So I left.

That, in and of itself, is no big deal. I still had my trusty 330 and figured I would revisit the new BMW purchase when the opportunity or fancy took me, whichever came first. But then the ‘tapakata, pakata, pakata’ noise started. Tapakata was swiftly accompanied by black smoke, and blue smoke, and I believe there may also have been some green and yellow smoke although it was difficult to tell with the cabin full of multicoloured smoke and the increasingly distracting noise of metal grinding on metal which had the same jarring effect as the guy on Jaws scraping his fingernails down the blackboard in the ‘Let’s close the beach before everyone dies’ scene.

The car limped into the BMW Service Centre and let out a small and, to my ear, quite final squeak as I turned off the ignition and sat in the car park hissing and creaking and clicking gently. The car that is, not me.

The prognosis was a fault with the air intake manifold. I asked for an explanation in English and was advised that two metal flaps had broken off and fallen inside the engine. The ‘tapakata’ grinding was the metal being mashed by and mashing the pistons and cylinders. “That sounds bad,” I said in my cheeriest ‘oh well, cars eh?’ voice. “How much will it cost to fix?” There was a pause before the technician said, “Seven thousand pounds.” Well, I barely paused at all before saying, “SEVE… What the fffggggnnn… you are SHITTING me, right???” “Then there’s the labour…” he added quietly, “…plus tax. In round numbers, ten grand.”

“So what you’re telling me is it’s a write-off,” I said. “I thought BMW engines were bulletproof. I thought BMW diesel engines were simply invincible. This one’s less that five years old, BMW serviced from new and has only done seventy thousand miles. It’s barely run-in.”

“Mmmm.” He said. “I can submit a ‘goodwill claim’ to BMW for you.”
“You mean it shouldn’t have happened?”
“I can’t say that Sir, but I can submit a goodwill claim with no liability attached.”
“So you do mean it shouldn’t have happened.”
“All I can say, Sir, is that it is ‘unusual’ and we wouldn’t normally expect a BMW of this age, with this mileage, to experience this fault.”
“It shouldn’t have happened.”
“Mmmmm.”

At this point, I could make a reasonable case, that if the numpty salesman had listened to me the first time round, I would have been in a new car before this problem ever arose. But I’m not going to do that, because that’s not the thing.

A few days later, I received a call from the technician…
“Good news Mr. McKee. We’ve heard from BMW and they’re prepared to make a goodwill repair contribution of £8,500.00. You would just have to pay the balance of £1,500.00.”
“So it shouldn’t have happened then.”
“It’s a goodwill gesture Mr. McKee, that’s all I can tell you.”
“Ok Mike, I’m a reasonable guy and it sounds like BMW is being reasonable so ‘Ok’, in principal, that’s acceptable. However…”

And I went on to explain that it would be a pointless waste of everyone’s time and money to spend the £8,500.00 on the repair when I didn’t actually want the car back. What I wanted was a new car. A new BMW. I explained that I’d been trying to buy one from them for a while but was a little confused by their seemingly mandatory test-drive policy. I was ‘happy’ to pay for my new car – anything up to the equivalent of a small neighbourhood in certain parts of Manchester – and all I needed now was for BMW to turn the £8,500.00 repair offer into a virtual part exchange. Basically and very simply (in my mind…) they could keep the old car (that shouldn’t have broken). I would accept their £8,500.00 car token and immediately and conditionally more than quadruple the value by adding cash to buy a new BMW from their showroom.

It all seemed so easy to me. I was the customer being inconvenienced, I knew what I wanted, I wasn’t going to make a fuss about the car that shouldn’t have broken and I was very reasonably going to reinvest the money they were offering me and add to the pot by giving them more. From BMW’s perspective, I figured they’d be happy to satisfy the customer, even better, the customer was going to spend even more money and even, even, betterer, the customer was going to continue driving a BMW, continue spending money on BMW servicing for the lifecycle of the car and would doubtless tell anyone who would listen about his experience with the BMW brand. Well, I was right about the last point.

BMW said, “No.” Not, ‘No and here’s the thinking behind our decision because we’d still like to retain you as a customer.’ Just, “No.”

Which brings me on to the thing. This story is a bit about money, it’s a bit about customer service, but that’s not the thing. The thing is about Brand Reputation. I expected more from the BMW brand. I must have spent in the region of quarter of a million pounds with BMW as a driver and, up until the point where my perceptions of the brand changed, I would doubtless have continued spending. I remember reading a BMW case study in college where the point was made that BMW didn’t try to sell customers a car, they wanted to secure customer loyalty to the brand so that they had ‘BMW drivers for life’. An admirable quest, but clearly complete bollocks.

I won’t be buying another BMW. Not now, not ever. I don’t imagine for a second that BMW will notice the difference but I will nonetheless exercise my right as a customer to take my money elsewhere. My perceptions of the brand have changed – for the worse. I’m going to be telling other people of my experience too, you’re reading this for example, and who knows, maybe that will influence the perceptions of others. One car buyer walking away (twice) from BMW is barely troubling, but if this experience is typical of the brand’s values, I don’t imagine it will be long before we’re all walking away. If I was the person responsible for maintaining the BMW brand reputation I’d be more than a little concerned.

The ‘Ultimate Driving Machine.’ Really? I don’t think so.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.
+44 (0)20 7323 6666