Those wacky marketers at MINI USA. Always up to something.

As a Mini owner on the BMW/MINI house distribution list, I recently received a message from them thanking me for being such a wonderful customer and enticing me to follow a link where I could further bulk up their customer data about me for more accurate targeting in the future receive their humble gratitude.

I clicked through. I had to look. Wouldn’t you? And like me, aren’t you dying to know how they personally thanked me for being a MINI-ite?

The link took me to a landing page with a pale, grainy image of a Mini front end. Upon closer examination, the graphic is made up of names. The names of… All of us. Every one of us. Every single Mini owner from the beginning of time (the new Mini, that is). And true to their word, my name was there. Well, the first name and last initial anyway.

I was so moved. There it was before me – a poignant monument to we Mini owners in the spirit of the Vietnam War Memorial. I had to fight the urge to put a piece of paper to the screen and burnish the outline of my name onto it with a pencil. No word yet if MINI USA is going to commission Maya Lin to supervise the rendering of this landing page in black polished marble at a site someplace near the Brighton Pier.

Click on your name in the collage and it puts a ‘like’ on your Facebook page — a nice bit of customer relationship fairy dust atop the CTR metrics, powerful enough to leave even the most jaded VP of Marketing completely enchanted with the results and deem the campaign “a complete success”.

All in all a very cheeky effort in email marketing CRM. Can’t wait to see what MINI USA will spring on me next.