BMW’s Mini Brand Launches Custom Roof Designer Online

Evaluation of the new roof design toolkit and some ideas for improvements and additions

Driving a BMW-Mini often is seen as the ultimate expression of individualism. People paying the extra premium for a small, but fun car often select a Mini to express their individual lifestyle and to set themselves ahead from the crowd. For me, this always seemed to be a bit a contradiction, as I have seen very few really “cool” people driving a Mini, and at least in Germany, Mini drivers seem to follow a general pattern of belonging to a conservative upper middle-class medium aged segment living in larger cities. (I have, however, to admit that driving a Mini really is fun and a very nice experience).

Also, from a mass customization point of view, a Mini has rather limited customization offerings. While the configurator suggests plenty of choice options, they are rather limited, especially with regard to style customization like color combinations between body, roof, and interior. All choices seem to be perfectly balanced to deliver neatly tuned combinations fitting the Mini brand image as seen by its corporate parents.

But now, there is ultimate choice. Customers now can freely design the Mini’s roof with their very own design. The roof is one of the signature design features of the Mini. It is often selected in a different color than the body. And now you not only can select from 15 or so standard colors, but really design your own, as the German weekly Der Spiegel reports in its online edition.

Enter the Mini Roof Designer, a very well done playful online design toolkit that allows you to generate your own roof design. The configurator is full of nice gimmicks providing a great experience, but not really helping you to come up with a better design. As far as I could evaluate this configuration toolkit, this – in the moment – is a pure marketing gimmick. You can design your roof and save it, but that’s it.

According to the regularly well informed Der Spiegel, however, you also can order very soon your individual design in form a custom-made foil with your individual pattern that your Mini dealer will fix on your roof. (and in the Carscoop blog I read that the orders are available only in Italy for the time being, Germany will follow in June, Austria in the third quarter, with further countries being added later).

Given the high prices for extras for the Mini, 400 Euros for this service seem to be not too expensive. I bet there even will be fans ordering their custom roof stickers without even owning a Mini. And I am looking forward to see all the really custom designs printed on Mini cars and how they match the look of their owners. Have a look in the gallery of the Roof Configurator to see what I mean.

Nice idea. Some thoughts I had while playing around with the configurator how to improve this offering :

(1) It will be interesting to see if and how Mini approves all designs and whether there will be limits of what people can print. For the online gallery publicly showing your saved design, a manual approval process takes place. After I saved my Mini, the system told me that it will take ONE WEEK to approve my design before it is online. Hey, we are in an online, real-time, instant gratification world and the automotive industry is talking about the Three-Day-Car http://www.3daycar.com/!!

(2) It is rather difficult to come up with a nice design. The system offers many tools, but as an average user without design skills, it is difficult to come up with something creative. Easy-to-modify starting designs are missing. Also, I would have loved to get some more inspirations, perhaps by famous designers sharing their own Mini roof. And if I would be a professional designer, I would love to be able to upload a design made in Photoshop or any other professional design program using a template provided by BMW.

(3) The custom Mini roof sounds like a perfect idea for a new Threadless clone . Let the best in the world design roofs in form of an open (ongoing) competition, and let the community of Mini fans and owners evaluate the designs and vote on the winners. Then produce these designs in limited editions and sell them within days.

(4) Or a modification of the Spreadshirt idea: Let users design roofs, and sell their individual designs to others. Designs are then individually printed, and designers get a share of the proceeds. Perhaps this also is a great after-sales tuning idea. Think of transferring the BEMZ idea of tuning IKEA sofas onto Mini roofs: Create custom Mini roof covers and sell them independently for 200 Euros. Given that about 1 Mio. New Minis have been sold, this sounds like a nice market opportunity.

So many opportunities for mass customization in the automotive industry. Let’s see what is happening next.

Comments

[Frank Piller]

Great comments and thoughts. Thanks, Christian! And I agree that the toolkit perhaps is not the largest help in its recent state for the individual customer who wants to design her/his Mini roof (I agree: If I really would like to have a cool roof design, I would use a different, more professional graphics program). But as mass customization here again is just used as a tool of interactive marketing, boosting PR and talk about the car, it seems to be a necessary part of the web sit experience.

[Christian M. Waller]

Some additional thoughts that came to my mind:

Is there really a need for a specific MINI graphic toolkit ?
Since nowadays nearly every WINDOWS or MAC user is creating and designing own grafics or photos, like for birthday cards, party invitations or online communities, at least with already preinstalled small programs or with buy to go professional solutions, I wonder why customers might need an extra graphic-tool in a brands website for a individual MINI roof-design ? Some might say that it is a strategic part of the brands “innovative” presentation others will argue it has to be in order to define the provided solution space. Overall it seems more or less an expensive marketing gadget, especially since a folio for a MINI roof could be generally printed on with all kinds of digital creations and might provide a much better usability and design, when the customer are allowed to use their own graphic tools. Combined with some templates of the roofs shape, provided as download, everybody could create offline and upload an individual graphic over a common interface. It realy is a pitty that most of the companies do not provide 3D-configuration for their cars anyway, then it would be even more easy to evidently mount the grafics in realtime on every potential position on the cars surface just by upload and clicking. This indeed is a wider view on relevant customer centric solutions, but wouldn`t that be usefull and easy ? Surely it would ! and additional contests or other user events could merge customers even stronger and long lasting.

[Christian M. Waller]

Thanks again for the Link to this exemplary case. Like already written MINI claims to be one of the most individual carbrands nowadays, missing out the fact, that the range of individual customer choice is not necessarily wider than in other cases and that the corevalues behind the brands exclusive proposition, have already been shaped in the customers perception some decades ago. In contrast to transformation of MINI by BMW which turned this car into a strictly lifestyle brand with high focus on single, urban, female customers an their potential upselling demands, it has once been one of the first cheap compact cars for everyday purpose, ready to be individualised on own hands even with small money. This is mostly why it became such a big success, guided by special driving characteristics and of course many triumphs in different racing series that turned the MINI over the years into a Myth with wide acceptance, even though it remained a niche model. Today the MINI is indeed a completely different car with a wide potential for customizing and most of us will agree that some part of its heritage can be expressed very well individually by letting the customer design the roof in a much wider variety than a classical union-jack or a racing flag. Nevertheless, experiencing the new tool on the website I have to mark, that this design interface again - like in so many cases - is not set up like an integrated toolkit, helping the customer to create and decide. It stays for single purpose only underestimating the complexity of creating an individual cardesign. Even though it will only be a folio in the end that is glued on the roof and dependent on the quality it will have, it might also be a big hurdle when reselling. Overall individually designing the surface of products by toolkit or upload of photos is not a new technique since you can find similar offers from kitchen furniture to credit cards. Again, hung up between CRM and marketing efforts this toolkit by MINI is just another gadget that does not provide additional value to the customer and shows how much experience is still needed to build up interactive competences in many companies. And yes, I agree. The creation of car designs might be even a better basis for an external business. MINI does not manufacture the folios themselves anyway I guess. Kind regards from Berlin, Christian