[Darth One]

Originally Posted by usshelena725

Meh, you have to remember that those on a dedicated BMW forum are going to be a very small minority of the overall customer base, not to mention that the bulk of the members here did not buy a new BMW, but rather a used one, for which BMW makes no money and doesn't really care about.

There are currently about 377,000 members here, but if you look at the last 20 years or so, BMW has sold around 48 million cars. That means that we represent only about 0.7% of the customer base, and that is factoring in used cars. I imagine that for new car sales, the percentage is even smaller.

BMW is never going to spend so much R&D to cater to less than 1% of the customer base, it would just be bad business.

I highly doubt they spend any significant amount of time looking at any forums, let alone this one. I could be wrong, though. Who knows.

You could be right, who knows? This all might just be pissing into the wind. And just to be super clear, your point about BMW not catering to the 1% is the same point I've been making in all my posts on this thread.

I work in marketing for a company that spends tens of millions of dollars a year in market research. The kind of immediate product feedback that happens here is pure gold - and it's free. You just have index it against other research to make sure you're not just listening to a bunch of outliers.

My company has "fanatics" and brand loyalists too, and we listen to them quite a bit. Even if their viewpoints can be extreme, they really care about our products and our brand, and really help us raise the bar with both their positive and negative comments.

I think it would be really foolish for BMW to alienate and not even listen to people who care enough about their products to discuss them on the internet all day. But I don't run their marketing department