Battle of the Brands: Mercedes-Benz vs BMW

Your weekly consumer insights round-up - find out what’s buzzing for automotive brands Mercedes-Benz and BMW, in the luxury category.

Mar 02, 2022 03:37:00 AM | Article | Campaign India Team Share -

The final pair of brands we analyse in our Automotives series comprises Mercedes-Benz and BMW - representative brands in India’s luxury automotives category. Which channels are driving the aspirational conversations in this category? And how are auto brands optimising their engagement of the digital-first consumer?

Talkwalker is a consumer intelligence platform, helping over 2,500 brands drive business impact with actionable consumer insights. The Battle of the Brands series utilises Talkwalker’s AI-enabled Blue Silk technology to analyse millions of images, videos, audio, conversations, and tags from across social media, blogs, news channels, and more. Providing a bird’s eye view of mentions, engagement, and sentiment surrounding some of the biggest brands in India today.

Mentions and engagement

The above chart captures Talkwalker Quick Search results on the Mercedes-Benz (pink) and BMW (purple) brands over a 6-month period, from 27 Aug 2021 to 28 Feb 2022.

When it comes to online conversations, Mercedes-Benz and BMW have been evenly matched in terms of mentions and engagements over the past 6 months, with a good mix of posts coming from both owned and earned media sources for their brands. Mentions which identified public figures, including celebrities as luxury vehicle owners, scored high on engagement, adding also to the prestige factor for these auto brands.

Top influencers

Talkwalker’s influencer analysis shows the online content creators and channels that are driving the most engagement on the Mercedes-Benz (pink) and BMW (purple) brands, based on Talkwalker Quick Search results.

Based on Talkwalker analysis, the official Twitter channels of Mercedes-Benz India and BMW India have topped the influencer charts, indicating that these automakers retain significant influence on brand conversations, at least amongst India’s Twitter community.

Social media has become indispensable to the auto marketer, as one of the primary means of nurturing and engaging the automotive audience through story-telling. Especially for the luxury category, these stories tend not to be focused on the automotive products alone - they aspire also to introduce a lifestyle and community. Take for example Mercedes-Benz’s #AreYouAMGReady campaign which is geared towards performance car lovers and Gen Z, or the #BMWJoyfest series which promises BMW enthusiasts (and their families) a fun-filled occasion - complete with high-adrenaline test drives.

Visual insights

Talkwalker’s visual insights provides a snapshot of the top engaged visual posts related to the Mercedes-Benz and BMW brands.

One of the biggest contributors to auto brand mentions and engagements are YouTube news and review channels. The sheer volume of engaging, user-generated content (such as this drive review by Tech Burner) warrants that auto brands consider their own YouTube and video strategy. These are low-hanging fruits for automotive brands, especially as they map the inclusion of more immersive, augmented reality (AR)/ virtual reality (VR) technologies in their consumer’s car-buying journey.

Image recognition

Talkwalker’s image recognition technology allows for image analysis and searches across 30,000+ brands.

To round off our analysis, we ran a search on the Mercedes-Benz logo via Talkwalker’s proprietary image recognition technology. Enhanced access to user-generated content allows for brands to capitalise on authentic, trending stories in real time – such as this testimonial, which is without a Mercedes-Benz mention or hashtag. Timely detection of these user-generated stories can go a long way in helping marketers to engage the most passionate members of their audience, and to grow a loyal brand community in the long run.

Catch up on the other automotives articles under the Battle of the Brands series, which cover brands in the electric two-wheeler, and personal vehicle categories.