BMW plans to open a $275-million center called “BMW Welt” (English translation: BMW World) in Munich, Germany, where customers can retrieve their new car purchases in the most luxurious car dealership in the world. As BMW Marketing Director Michael Ganal told Reveries: “Our dealers are like local churches, while BMW Welt is St. Peter’s Cathedral.” BMW Welt, set to open in October of this year, is centered around a futuristic structure with a cyclone-like entrance that ushers visitors into various shops, restaurants, and an immersive experience of the BMW brand and its history. The structure is situated next to the Four-Cylinder Building and the BMW Museum, another one of BMW’s architecturally bold buildings. BMW Welt is not the first of its kind; Volkswagen built its Autostadt featuring a delivery center seven years ago, which also holds a museum, pick-up center, and pavilions for each manufacturer in the Volkswagen Group.
As Reveries reports:
Garel Rhys of Cardiff University says the idea is “to re-create product differentiation on a different plane … As the cars become almost homogenous in technology, the battle is on the marketing side.” German customers pay an extra $630 for the privilege of picking up their cars at BMW Welt, while Americans pay a bit more. BMW expects about “800,000 visitors a year, many more than those taking delivery of new cars.” While the carmaker hopes the experience will boost BMW sales, Michael Ganal admits that the return on marketing investment will be hard to calculate. “At the end of the day,” he says, “we have to recognize that a car-delivery center is just a car-delivery center.”
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