BMW The Ultimate Riding Machine

Advertising has been used since the earliest days of the motorcycle industry to attract buyers. Courtesy of BMW Motorcycle Magazine and the BMW Group Archive, here is a selection of BMW advertising stretching back to 1923.

British-Canadian humorist and economist Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) had his own thoughts on the matter. “Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it”. And Henry Ford (1863-1947) simply said that “50 per cent of the money invested in advertising is wasted. But you never know which half it is”.

When BMW started to promote their first motorcycle in 1923, advertising was still restricted to traditional media such as newspapers and magazines. Of course the R 32 had to have a full-page ad, since the bigger an advert, the longer the reader looks at it. An image attracts more interest than simply text, so posters and magazine adverts were first designed by painters and poster artists, especially if you wanted – or could afford – a bit of colour.

The marketing people would come up with a slogan, while it was up to the typographer (this was before the days of the ‘art editor’!) to compose the layout. By the beginning of the Thirties the quality of film as well as camera technology made immense advances in action photography possible, and so more and more black-and-white pictures were to be seen in BMW adverts.

As the years went on, and as dictated by the Nazi regime, the emphasis would lay on the success achieved by BMW works riders on BMW motorcycles in both national and international contests. Between 1933 and 1945, during the National Socialism period in Germany, heroes had to be celebrated and their success used for propaganda purposes. BMW, like all other motorcycle and automobile manufacturers in Germany, had to follow orders...

When the devastating conflict was over and the country began to recover, BMW continued trying to capitalize on their sporting achievement. But now it was different. Instead of solo road racing, from 1954 on the Bavarians would leave their mark in World Championship Sidecar Racing. Not all adverts were track orientated – they deservedly boasted about Germany’s fastest production motorcycle, the famous R 68, with its genuine ton-up performance. 

At the beginning of the Sixties there was even a whiff of humour to be seen in BMW ads – not only in the themes, but also in the headlines. Until then BMW motorcycles were only available in black. It seems that the Bavarians had been paying close attention to Henry Ford, who almost 50 years earlier had proclaimed: “People can have the Model T in any colour – so long as it’s black”.

But with the end of the decade, colour ads were to become a must for motorcycle manufacturers. Double-page spreads in black-and-white were already expensive enough and BMW just couldn’t afford to splash out. In the first half of the Sixties the Bavarians were pretty much unchallenged in the home big bike market. But with ambitious and colourful competition coming from Japanese manufacturers towards the end of the Sixties BMW had to react, especially when they announced the new /5 range for 1969.

In the USA, Japanese motorcycle manufacturers together with English rivals like Norton, BSA and Triumph, started to run lavish full-colour double-page spreads in Cycle and Cycle World. In good old Europe things were a bit more difficult for the advertising agencies commissioned by BMW. European Union bureaucrats decided that they needed to protect us from an excess of fun and prohibited adverts focusing on speed or suggesting that a fast bike was a guarantee of great sex.

BMW’s European ads were forced to focus on the pleasures of riding a Bavarian motorcycle, how comfortable your sweetheart would be on the pillion, and the reliability of shaft drive. That kind of worthy advertising may have been OK in Germany in the late Seventies but BMW was facing fierce competition at home and abroad. Their 1,000cc Boxer engines produced a nominal 70hp while the Japanese in-line fours slowly but surely approached the genuine 100hp mark. It was not surprising that thousands of unsold BMWs started to collect dust in warehouses both in Germany and the US.

With the emergence of the Honda CBX and Kawasaki Z1300 with their even more powerful in-line six-cylinder engines, the BMW advertising agencies once again had to use their wits. A double-page ad in one German motorcycle magazine showed a head-on drawing of a motorcycle with an in-line six engine on the left page, underneath the slogan: “The reason why we don’t realize nightmares” while on the opposite page a black-and-white picture of a BMW R 100 RS carried the legend: “We prefer a motorcycle for everyday life”.

The fine print of the advertisement stated that it would be easy for BMW to build a motorcycle like the Honda CBX, simply by adapting the 143hp M 60 engine used in their 3-series 323i car. “But we won’t do that. Such engines are for automobile use and would definitely overstrain the chassis of a motorcycle”, was the excuse printed underneath the drawing that every motorcycle enthusiast would readily identify as the silhouette of the Honda Six.

The fine print beneath the picture of the R 100 RS noted, among other things, that: “BMW will not follow the practice of adapting road racing motorcycles for day-to-day use”. Well, that was some 30 years ago. BMW today builds the most powerful street-legal motorcycle in the world – the S 1000 RR – with almost 200hp at the end of the throttle. Furthermore, those persistent rumours of a luxury in-line six BMW tourer have now been revealed in the shape of the new BMW Concept 6 that was unveiled late in 2009. This genuine straight-six will further expand the K Series range in the foreseeable future and it looks like the first model to be introduced will be an innovative and luxurious touring machine.