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September 10, 2007
USUALLY, when Madison Avenue uses nostalgia to peddle products, the result is the kind of “misty water-colored memories” that Barbra Streisand warbled about in “The Way We Were.” By contrast, a humorous campaign from BMW stands out for asking consumers to reminisce about a time in their lives they might have sought to forget, according to the New York Times.
The theme is “Relearn to drive,” which is also the address for the campaign’s Web site. The goal is to persuade car owners to consider attending the BMW school because a good deal of what they learned when they were taught to drive is outdated or irrelevant — or may have been wrong in the first place.
To sow doubts about how people were taught to drive and persuade them to “undo the damage,” the site presents nine archetypal (or stereotypical) characters intended to represent the people who helped most Americans learn to drive.
The characters include a feckless stepfather, an impatient older sister, a brusque high school coach, a bumpkin of a country cousin and a neurotic mother. They are all dissected in droll descriptions as basically well-meaning but hopelessly unqualified for the task. Thus the need for a visit to the school, which the Web site promotes as having been “built from the ground up to make you a better driver.”
Posted by Peter C. T. Elsworth 
at 10:50 AM to BMW
, Safety
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