Niche automotive markets respond to different online styles. Publishing Dynamics' VP outlines a strategy to connect with consumers' varied interests on their terms.
Today's luxury car designers spend countless hours honing the interior cabins of their cars.

Every detail is refined and each facet of the interface is fine-tuned to maximize the driver's experience. Extending this experience to the small screen, however, has been a constant challenge.
On TV, the lines are clearly drawn, with brands spending the bulk of their time creating, "montages of attraction.

" This technique juxtaposes shots of interiors, exteriors, smiling faces and the car in motion to persuasively summarize the experience: emotion and all. Local TV buys borrow some of these shots, but for the most part, these online experiences differ only on service, price and selection.
This paradigm has survived completely intact on the web.

Brand sites get more and more advanced in conveying the emotional ties that bind, taking a broadcast approach toward experience and customization. Dealer sites have used technology to propel data delivery, showing inventory, features and prices. But the interfaces at the dealer level often leave much to be desired - almost contrary to the brand image - and are rarely experiential.

Where all these methods have failed to deliver is in technology. Users can only experience so much, for so long, without getting bored.
Branded desktop applications (BDAs) bridge the gap for luxury brands and dealers by being platform-independent.

Instead of having to conform to the restrictions of large television audiences, or web browsers, you get the best of both worlds: a completely customized interface easily combining data and design.
Need a refresher on what exactly BDAs are? You can check out some from Driving Interactive.

Delivering your tangible experiences in concert with the functional power of your data accomplishes many of the goals your industrial designers were trying to achieve with their work. Put their effort on the desktop, and it becomes a far more powerful proposition in a few distinct ways:
Many luxury car owners will enjoy the feeling that they're always being surrounded by the luxury your auto delivers. If your demographic is made of Boomers, all the better.

These are what we call, "task-based" users: people who just want to know the exact steps needed to achieve a goal in an interface.
They will love the idea that they already know how to operate the interface. That comfort will keep them engaged in your brand on their desktops all day.

The BDA also extends to your larger audience of car fans, who will enjoy feeling like they're even closer to the experience of driving your cars.
How many test drives could you get if your policy was that people could pick up your cars, drive them and return them without having to talk to anyone at your dealership? It's not practical in the real world, but it can be perceptually achieved very effectively on the desktop.

What you lose in not having someone actually in the driver's seat, you gain in repeated exposures to your unique experience.
When you offer your luxury dashboard as an interface, you're allowing people to feel like they're testing out your car and trying the controls, without a salesperson hawking them.
One of the most intriguing aspects to this idea of a BDA as a dashboard interface is that as users go through the process of learning about your car from the car's own controls, they becomes trained and extremely familiar with your model.

In the most practical terms, the BDA acts like a flight simulator, giving your audience lots of practice at using it before logging miles on the real thing. Consider the power of using the desktop "touch-screen" to let users dial-in to streaming audio or video or letting them turn on the car lights to change the shading on your interface. These repeated actions are in fact training them to be most familiar with the user experience of driving your car, instead of a competitor's.

Even if they ultimately view the sales process of another brand, the experience of your BDA will put them in the driver's seat comparing how their dashboard environment compares to yours.
Naturally, this idea of BDA-as-simulator greatly increases the audience's likelihood of continuing to purchase, or make the switch to your brand, simply because they're more used to the way your car operates than another.
Being free of design restraints is just one of the advantages to creating a branded desktop application.

But you can see, merely having this one advantage in your corner can make a great deal of difference when it comes to shaping discourse and finally, experience, in driving more sales and an intimate relationship with your luxury car brand.