Car makers have long used to sell their products. Recently, however, both BMW and Renault have based their latest European marketing campaigns around the icon of modern biology.
BMW’s campaign, which launches its new 3-series sports saloon in Britain and Ireland, shows the new creation and four of its earlier versions zigzagging around a landscape made up of giant DNA sequences, with a brief explanation that DNA is the molecule responsible for the inheritance of such features as strength, power and intelce. The Renault offering, which promotes its existing Laguna model, employs evolutionary theory even more explicitly. The company’s television commercials intersperse clips of the car with scenes from a lecture by Steve Jones, a professor of genetics at University of London.
BMW’s campaign is intended to convey the idea of development allied to heritage. The latest product, in other words, should be viewed as the new and improved scion of a long line of good cars. Renault’s message is more subtle. It is that evolution works by gradual improvements rather than sudden leaps (in this, Renault is aligning itself with biological orthodoxy). So, although the new car in the advertisement may look like the old one, the external form conceals a number of significant changes to the engine. While these alterations are almost invisible to the average driver, Renault hopes they will improve the car’s performance, and ultimately its survival in the marketplace.
Whether they actually do so will depend, in part, on whether marketers have read the public mood correctly. For, even if genetics really does offer a useful metaphor for automobiles, employing it in advertising is not without its ers. That is because DNA’s public image is ambiguous. In one context, people may see it as the cornerstone of modern medical progress. In another, it will bring to mind such controversial issues as abortion, genetically modified foodstuffs, and the sinister subject of eugenics.
Car makers are probably standing on safer ground than biologists. But even they call make mistakes. Though it would not be obvious to the casual observer, some of the DNA which features in BMW’s ads for its nice, new car once belonged to a woolly mammoth—a beast that has been extinct for 10,000 years. Not, presumably, quite the message that the marketing department was trying to convey.
The difference between BMW’s and Renault’s campaign is that