Elon Musk, head honcho at Tesla and SpaceX, is an extraordinarily clever man. He understood that the key to building a startup Electric Vehicle (EV) car company was to make vehicles that were desirable. That meant starting at the luxury end of the market and working downwards: show that EVs were better than traditional vehicles at the top end and then work backwards.
He initially did this for purely financial reasons. Car companies are notoriously investment heavy. Overheads are huge. There is a lot to build. The only way to produce enough finance to pay for a car like the Model 3 to be built at volume was to build something with considerable profit margins and those margins only exist in luxury cars.
The Model S has a reported margin of 25%. That’s a big profit per vehicle. It’s also a lot of money that Musk and his team could then re-invest in expanding and preparing to launch a truly mass-market EV. But there’s another element to this strategy.
It builds a luxury brand. And with a luxury brand comes something that other EV manufacturers are struggling to attain,… desirability.
Because Tesla set out to throw every brand new (cow) bell and whistle at their Model S and Model X luxury cars, people know Tesla as the car company that over-delivers. They’re the car company that’ll bring you the future today. Why have a regular air filter when you can have a Bio-weapon Defence Mode capable of reducing Bejing or LA’s lethal smog to alpine-clarity? Why settle for punching keys on a dashboard when you can get a 17 inch tablet?
By aiming to wow the people who can afford luxury, they’ve made fans of people who can’t.
And now they can.
When you buy a Tesla Model 3, you’re not buying a car: you’re buying into a brand that’ll give you the luxury and technology you’ve been drooling over for 3 years.
And so Tesla have built a brand that allows them to sell hundreds of thousands of cars a year without advertising. Tesla don’t advertise – not on TV, not in print and not online. It’s the power of their name and the luxury it represents, as well as their fantastic word-of-mouth, that draw people to them.
I work a lot in branding and Tesla never fail to impress me.
If you want to talk about branding or speak to me about how to boost the desirability of your products, pop me a message.
Tim Austin is lead Copywriter and Public Speaking Coach at Wing Copywriting and Public Speaking. Learn more about him at wingcopywriting.co.uk
Lead Copywriter, Public Speaking Coach and owner of Wing Copywriting. Writer of authentic, hard-working Advertising Copy for business clients in Manchester, the North West and across the UK.
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