Cheapens the experience of owning an $80k+ car, regardless of who you are. I don't have an issue with them wanting to market to younger audiences.. the issue is their marketing is absolutely ridiculous, and the car which they ARE marketing to younger audiences is out of reach for most financially (it's out of reach for most regardless of age range, but ESPECIALLY for younger audiences).
But again, that's not the issue. I'm simply saying, younger audience or not, the marketing campaign is incredibly bizarre. Remember when BMW had to apologize for using the "ok boomer" tagline? Again, BMW seems to be taking the "bad press is good press" approach as if they're trying hard to get noticed and get everyone talking. The reason I say this cheapens the experience is because BMW's are not cheap, they're expensive relative to the average car. It has nothing to do with BMW customers needing to get over themselves.
I can't believe I'm actually engaging you in this.... but you need to look at data before you start making anecdotal claims. You're LITERALLY describing things using anecdotal evidence.
You can do your own analysis if you'd like, but here's the data for mean and median household income by age range, year over year in the US:
https://www2.census.gov/programs-sur...lds/h10ar.xlsx
A few points:
1) Despite your claims of all these social media influencers and their impact on the younger audience, the 15-24 age range actually saw a DECREASE in average household income 2018 to 2019.
2) The age range which saw the largest INCREASES in average household income 2018 to 2019 was the 55-64 age range, followed by the 35-44 age range.
3) The 15-24 year age range (which presumably has the largest concentration of youtube/tiktok/IG influencers) has not shown significant cumulative increase in mean/median incomes over the past 5 years, relative to the other age groups. This suggests the "youtube millionaires" represent a very small % of the group to a point where their income figures are negligible to the overall income figures (of ANY age group).
I'm not denying that influencers have impact on purchasing decisions (just that they don't really have an impact on overall income levels, which was your original premise). The issue is when you're leveraging an $80k car to reach that audience using questionable at best marketing tactics, you risk alienating the people that can actually afford said car.
As I mentioned before, people will still buy or not buy the car (hell, BMW was the #1 luxury automaker in sales last year), but the marketing campaign is just downright bizarre and even embarrassing.