"No."

Caught your attention, didn’t it?

Caught mine, too, when I saw the little white booklet inserted into The New Yorker with just that one little word on it, black on white.

So, I dislodged the little white booklet, which was a marketing piece from BMW.

And while I hope to get through the rest of my life without ever owning another automobile, let alone a BMW, I did read through the entire little booklet, where I learned that “No”, BMW will not compromise, copy cat, or “give in to mass-market vanillaism”. (Note to BMW copywriters: cute idea for a neologism, but vanilla-ism would be a lot easier to read with a hyphen in it.)

So now I know that BMW has let artists like Calder, Warhol, and Rauschenberg were given BMW’s to use as a canvas. I don’t know what happened to these cars - museum pieces? - but they look kind of cool. (I never heard of César Manninque, but I liked his car, which looked like a whacked-out Joan Miró.)

I know that BMW is working on cleaner diesel fuel, and that they’re powering their Spartanburg, SC plant with methane. (Who even knew they had a plant in Spartanburg?)

If the first goal of any marketing campaign is to get someone to pay attention to you, kudos to BMW marketing. They got me to read the little white book cover to cover.

And if they can get even a small percentage of readers to look more closely at BMW, then they will have succeeded.

As for me, even if I was starting to think a bit more benevolently about BMW, a few minutes after reading the little white book, I was attempting to cross Mt. Vernon Street at Charles. Some jack-ass in a Beemer had pulled his car completely through the cross-walk, the better to leap into his turn when the light changed.

BMW isn’t responsible for buyer behavior - or are they?

I’ll have to go back and consult the little white book to see what they have to say about drivers who won’t take “No” for an answer when it comes to cross-walks and red lights.

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By the way, the next car I don’t want to own will probably be a Prius or some other hybrid.

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