BMW

My first real internship was at BMW Türkiye, three months in Istanbul where I showed up without much idea of what working at a car company would actually involve. The role was never really one thing: I moved between customer experience, digital, loyalty, data, and marketing, and the team seemed to expect that kind of movement rather than treat it as unusual.

BMW Türkiye felt like a global brand trying to run things locally, and that tension showed up constantly in how people worked. Decks went out in Turkish or English depending on who was in the room, and I watched how the same underlying point got reframed when the audience was Istanbul versus when it was meant for Munich. I wasn't running anything, but it was a useful first look at what it actually takes to keep a premium brand moving on the ground.

Loyalty was one of the most complex areas I sat in on. In automotive it's not points and discounts. It's about keeping someone in the brand ecosystem for years after they buy the car, through service, upgrades, and ongoing engagement.

I sat in on work around BMW Türkiye's loyalty tiers: Private, Exclusive, Premium, and Prelude. Each tier served a different customer segment with different benefits and service expectations. My role was research and synthesis, not designing the program from scratch.

Within each tier, I helped document what shaped the customer profile: who they were, how BMW stayed in touch, and what benefits each tier included.

I also reviewed proposals from vendors and internal teams about extending the loyalty program. That taught me how to evaluate trade-offs: what sounds good on paper versus what actually moves retention. Deciding what to leave out mattered as much as deciding what to include.

One of the most important things I learned at BMW was that after-sales is where the real money lives. Selling a car is a one-time event. Service visits, maintenance packages, and upgrades over the ownership lifecycle are the recurring revenue engine. Loyalty programs exist to keep customers coming back for service instead of going to independent shops.

That reframed everything else I touched: campaign emails, service appointment flows, and the loyalty tiers themselves. They all existed to pull the customer deeper into the BMW ecosystem after the sale.

This was where I first got my hands on real operational data: production databases, messy exports, and normalization problems that only show up when humans have been entering data for years.

I learned to sketch Entity-Relationship Diagrams by analyzing BMW Türkiye's actual data and mapping how customers, vehicles, service visits, and loyalty entries related to each other. I drew them by hand before formalizing them digitally, learning the notation as I went.

The normalization work was about understanding data dependencies: why a field belongs in a table, what happens if you duplicate it, where the keys connect. Messy in practice, but that's where the intuition built. I've used it in every technical role since.

I also reverse-engineered BMW Türkiye's website data flow: what forms collected what information, where it was stored, how it moved between systems, and where gaps existed.

Most operational data lived in SAP. I learned to navigate the system, run queries, and export data into Excel. Not glamorous work, but it required understanding what each field meant and how the data was structured upstream.

In Excel I used pivot tables and functions to turn raw exports into reports leadership could use: competitor comparisons, trend summaries, service metrics for meetings. I picked up SQL fundamentals along the way: keys, joins, and how relational databases connect information.

I also helped build campaigns, from tier structures and pricing to demographic targeting and on-location shoots. End-to-end exposure to how a campaign goes from strategy to execution.

I sat in on campaign planning too: who a promotion targeted, what they got, and what it cost to deliver. Mostly listening and helping put decks together, but it was my first look at how ideas get narrowed down when there are more of them than budget.

BMW Türkiye partnered with an NGO for an Earth Day shoot, and I went on location to ask people on camera about sustainability and environmental responsibility. First-hand marketing, not designing from a desk but creating content in the field.

It closed the gap between a planning document and the real world: timing, weather, whether someone wanted to talk on camera. Problems spreadsheets don't prepare you for.

I walked into BMW not knowing what SAP looked like or how a loyalty program worked. Three months later I had enough context to see how data, marketing, sales, and CX fit together inside a real organization. Not mastery, but intuition, and every role since has built on it.

Presenting in two languages taught me to think about who was listening, not just what I wanted to say. The messy data work taught me the same thing in a different way: real exports, missing fields, duplicate keys traced back to a form someone built years ago. That's where the learning actually happened.