Brand Audit Report Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

Brand Audit Report - Essay Example The origins of BMW trace back to 1913 when a Bavarian named Karl Rapp started an aircraft-engine shop in Munich called Rapp Motoren Werke. The company focused in airplane engines though Rapp reported that at the beginning stages it was quite difficult and they suffered from extreme vibration. In 1917 Rapp resigned from the industry and it was then guided by an Austrian engineer Franz-Josef Popp, who altered its name to Bayerische Motoren Werke. That same year, the chief engineer Max Friz also planned the industry’s first aircraft engine, the six-cylinder Type III, which was formed due to the strong demand for the engines of BMW. When the1919 agreement of Versailles had forbidden any German companies from making aircraft engines, BMW then switched to creating air brakes for the railway cars. In 1923 Friz developed the industry’s first motorcycle, the R32, a model that held globally as speedy proceedings for all motorcycles throughout the 1930’s. In 1928 the indust ry entered into the automobile field by obtaining Fahrzeugwerke Eisenach, a creator of small time based cars in Eisenach, Germany. â€Å"In the 1930s BMW began producing a line of larger touring cars and sports cars, introducing its highly successful model-the 328 sports car-in 1936† (Military Motorcycles, Part 2: WWII and BMW, 2012). In 1945, the Allied forces dismantled industries major factories. Moreover, BMW had finished making garden and kitchen tools and also it had introduced a novel, low-priced motorcycle to the German market in 1948. The industries returned to the automobile manufacturing in the 1950s and it resulted in low sales. In the 1960s the industry twisted its fortunes by concentrating only on the compact touring cars and sports sedans, and then it began to fight with Mercedes-Benz for the markets in the United States and Europe. â€Å"BMW's U.S. sales peaked in 1986 but then dropped steeply, partly due to competition from two new luxury cars-Lexus, made by Toyota Motor Corporation, and Infiniti, made by Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. The 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall led to a boom in car sales in Europe, and in 1992 BMW outsold Mercedes-Benz in Europe for the first time† (BMW Car Logo History, 2009, par.5). Another company that poses a major threat to BMW through its stiff competitiveness is Billabong. BMW also faces challenges from various independent firms presenting their own performance model type cars as opposed to the models of BMW. A number of performance enhancement tools and features may be added to these cars that are basically based on those manufactured by BMW. The independent firms indentified to be involved with manufacturing performance enhanced cars include Alpina, Dinan Cars, Hamann Motorsport, Hartge and AC Schnitzer. In 1990 BMW created a business with the British aerospace firm Rolls-Royce PLC to create aircraft engines for its business jets. In the year 1992 BMW broke the ground by planting the automobile factor y in Spartanburg, South Carolina, though its initial automobile planting was done in US. In 1994 BMW obtained 80% of the shares in Rover Group, a British producer of luxury cars, small cars and Land Rover sport utility vehicles from the British Aerospace PLC. Brand attributes: Brand attributes are a group of characteristics that recognize the character, physical traits of brands, like the attributes that permit us to consistently recognize persons. At BMW, the brand attributes