MINI? That's a BMW, right?

When teaching, I encouraged students to bring in examples of good and bad marketing to discuss as a class exercise. It seems old habits die hard – an ex-student sent me this.

The ad appeared on the home page of Microsoft Edge. What errors can you find?

Her answers – with which I agree – are shown below.


1 The ad is for MINI … the nice shiny car in the picture isn’t a MINI.

2 Each word is capitalized, even the one-character indefinite article. ‘MINI official UK site – request a 48 hour test drive’ is better. I’ll accept that beauty can be in the eye of the beholder in this case.

3 The message is rather formal – almost a command. ‘Request’ is also vague – requests can be rejected. Why not something like; Book your 48-hour test drive on MINI’s official UK website. Note, ‘site’ and ‘website’ are different things, there’s plenty of space for the extra four characters. And yes, you may think it picky, but ’48-hour’ is a compound adjective describing a noun, so it should be hyphenated.

4 A domain name thing. As per the copy text, the brand is MINI [an issue from when BMW bought mini] – so the presented domain name should be MINI.co.uk. You all know domain names aren’t case sensitive don’t you? I’m also wary about using capitals in directory and file names of a URL, but it’s not a deal breaker in this example.

5 I’ve saved the best – that is, worst – ‘til last. There is no such web page as https://www.mini.co.uk/New/Car – so the link doesn’t work … which means the ad is a TOTAL* waste of time and resources. * uppercase for emphasis.