[zx10guy]

Watching what is going on at BMW is what has happened in another market....high end audio/video. It seems when a brand or line up starts to gain mass market recognition, management decides to dump whatever they did well in pursuit of gaining more of that mass market share. There's no doubt growing sales is important in the viability of the company or line up. But what always gets lost is the identity of why they got there in the first place....doing something well.

I can point to the Pioneer Elite line for TVs. Undisputed, the best TV on the market when they were still a viable entity. It took years after Pioneer pulled out of the market for others to catch up to them. What killed the Pioneer Elite TV? The drive to mass market the brand which diluted the value of the product. To produce a high quality TV like they did required lots of money in R&D and custom manufacturing of parts. Pioneer used custom ASICs for lots of their controller boards. All this quality gets lost in the mass market where price is king. Pioneer put themselves in a situation where either they had to start degrading the quality of the product or pull back to the specialty dealers which got them where they were in the first place.

Another example of the fall of a great company is Mirage Speakers for you Canadians. The once heralded company that produced the flagship M1 and M3 speakers are no reduced to producing run of the mill satellite speakers.

I see this with BMW. The uninitiated of the driving public just sees the BMW brand and all the past mystique of what made BMW a sought after car. They don't understand nor really care about the main reason why BMW became a desirable brand. As long as it has a BMW emblem, the mass public doesn't care what it's attached to. And also look at how the purchasing environment is set up with BMW. Leases. I know there are some that have their reasons to lease. But you can't deny the use of leases to make the monthly payments affordable for more people who get into a BMW. I do know things are changing with BMW's leasing programs. But this doesn't change what has happened over the past few years.