advertising the company could posess. BMWs are purchased by enthusiasts and these enthusiasts read the automotive press. The new Japanese makes have been able to usurp some of the space in these publications from BMW by introducing new features and technology updates on a more continuous basis.BMW buyers also make their choice based on the level of refinement in these automobiles. A BMW "just feels right". This refinement of BMW products has traditionally come from a long development process with many levels of prototyping and product re-design. The Japanese have been able to approach this level of refinement in a much shorter development cycle by making smaller changes to the product but on a more frequent basis.The Japanese have also introduced much higher levels of build quality into the Sport/Luxury car market. While initial build quality is not the main marketing strategy for BMW as it would be for a company like Toyota, it is still highly important to stay at a world class level. If the build quality of BMW vehicles begins to fall behind their competition, they risk losing a portion of the brand equity that took 50 years to build. It is recognized by many people in the BMW organization that many of initial quality problems thay take place at the start of a new product are a result of insuficient time building the new product by a large scale production process. In the Harvard business case Carl-Peter Forster states:"All our time in pilot production is spent identifying and solving the big problems. Do the parts fit? If not we redisign the tooling. Then, in theory, we are supposed to move on to the fine tuning: How does the surface look? Are the edges of the parts perfectly aligned? Unfortunately, by the time we solve the big problems, we dont have much time left for fine tuning and a lot of minor problems have to be dealt with in production."The questions that the leaders of BMW are currently faced with are whether ...
