A few weeks ago, I wrote a short essay on LinkedIn outlining why I believed Keiko Fujimori—despite having failed three times to get elected in the past—was now in the best position to win the presidential elections. My theory was entirely based on the fact that, where her messaging used to be somewhat scattered and improvised, we now had a very tight, very focused, and very emotionally resonant concept to work as the foundation for every message, regardless of the situation at hand.

I briefly referenced this short essay in last week’s essay on how the Leave side won the Brexit referendum 10 years ago, because the brand concept was structured in the same way. While I had nothing to do with the Brexit referendum, the way the Leave campaign was structured around a simple concept is very similar to how I have been developing campaigns over the past 30 years.

Keiko has now won the elections, and building brands to win is ultimately what GNIROB is all about, so let’s re-visit that essay.

Lima, 10 June 2026.

Before we start this essay, I’ll warn you that I am a terrible predictor of election results. You should not take my election predictions seriously.

I think this is partly because a big part of my job is developing brand strategy, and in the process of doing that, my role is often to reframe complex propositions into very simple concepts. But political systems are and remain immensely complex, with millions of extremely divergent actors working out their subjective values into a binary electoral result.

In other words, there is no lens you can use that simplifies the dynamics at hand into a predictable scenario. Which is a pretty weird thing, if you think about it: given the radically different impact for so many people, it’s baffling how a categorical win is sometimes determined by the smallest majority. In the current Peruvian elections, the majority will be something around 20,000 votes either way. Hair thin.

So, what I’m going to talk about instead, is the reason why I believe Keiko Fujimori has the best possible brand strategy of any candidate in Peru’s presidential elections.

Whether this then translates into her winning this current election is anyone’s guess. But if she doesn’t get over the line, we can discuss some of the reasons why—even though her campaign is very good—it may not be enough.

As most of my readers will know by now, my general modus operandi in brand strategy is to put all efforts and resources into owning a tiny bit of real estate in the consumer’s mind—a single brand concept—which is then emotionally augmented to such a degree that consumers believe it to be the most important value when they’re thinking about the category. In other words, we want to own a category entry point.

So, a few examples:

If you’re emotionally engaged with the idea that your next car should be safe (maybe you’ve got a family to protect) then Volvo’s long-standing connection to this category entry point will lead you to the natural conclusion that you should book a test drive with them.

If you’re emotionally engaged with the idea that a courier should not lose a package you want to send (maybe it’s your grandfather’s will), then UPS’s long-standing connection to this category entry point will lead you to the natural conclusion you should book a collection with them.

If you’re emotionally engaged with the idea that a watch should express success (maybe it’s what you’ve been working towards for the past decade), then Rolex’s long-standing connection to this category entry point will lead you to the natural conclusion you should “reach for the crown” as their slogan calls it.

So…

What is Keiko’s brand concept?

Simple: “order”.

It’s really as simple as that, and that’s the reason behind its power, because it’s a claim she can back up with an easily-communicated brand heritage. Keiko’s father turned Peru from a chaotic country on the verge of the abyss into a somewhat orderly country back in the ‘90s.

Alberto Fujimori was voted in after twenty years of economic mismanagement that culminated in not one but two bouts of hyperinflation, by a country that was almost taken over by the Sendero Luminoso’s Maoist terrorists, who were literally bombing entire neighbourhoods of Lima off the map. His legacy is two-fold:

1. He oversaw the rescue operation of one of history’s biggest hostage situations, in which over 500 people were taken hostage by MRTA terrorists at the Japanese embassy in Lima. After a 120-day siege, the rescue operation was, well, spectacular: “only” one hostage died on the way to the military hospital, and two army officers who are now national heroes. With this operation, Fujimori managed to breathe new energy into the fight against terrorism that eventually saw the capture of Abimael Guzman and the dissolution of both the MRTA and the Sendero Luminoso.

2. He managed to create a new, independent central bank whose currency has been the most stable in Latin America for just over 30 years now. Even during the crisis of 2008, Peru’s economy remained very ordered and very stable. The fact that Peru has been growing so much over the past 25 years despite the country’s political instability is largely attributable to this, and to its by-product: the depoliticization of economic activity.

Now for the second part:

How do you make such a simple proposition emotionally resonant?

Again, simple: nostalgia.

Many Peruvians are unhappy with the situation right now: Lima has fallen to a different kind of terrorism. The mafia gangs from Venezuela. The extortionists. The sicarios. The cocaine producers from the VRAEM regions.

There is a deep desire for the kind of order that people from Europe take for granted, and it’s made all the more powerful because it wasn’t that long ago that people felt the joy of coming out of such chaotic times and of building a positive future for their children.

Arguably, the word “Again” is the most powerful in the “Make America Great Again” slogan that won Donald Trump the election, precisely because it evokes that nostalgia. The same goes for the word “Back” in the “Take Back Control” slogan that won the Brexiteers their majority. It’s nostalgia.

In Keiko’s case, that word is “Vuelve”: order returns. It’s a much stronger proposition, because it suggests that it is within reach—we used to have it. And it’s stronger because it evokes for many people the idea that things were better when they were younger. The fact that Keiko’s father has now passed away even works in our favour here: we can mythologise him and apply a similar relationship to his concept as you might relate to with, say, “Return of the Jedi”.

Once you see this connection with such an archetypal story, all kinds of lights will shine brightly in your mind, because Keiko’s victory feels as inevitable as the ending in every myth humans have been writing down for the past 3,000 years.

Now, great as this all feels, there is still one aspect that may just undo its power: while an electoral candidate might have a fantastic brand concept for a coming election, true brand power comes from many years of embodying a single value in the mind of the consumer (or citizen, in this case).

We mentioned Volvo earlier: Volvo have spent the best part of 50 years talking about just one thing: “safety”. You need this kind of long-term concept to forge a mnemonic path in the mind of the individual, so that their desire for safety would translate almost automatically into a desire for a Volvo car.

By contrast, political campaigns are often strategized and implemented in the span of months. An election campaign is more like going back to the kind of film campaigns I used to work on for Twentieth Century Fox, Disney, Miramax, Buena Vista, etc: a film is coming out in a few months’ time, and we need everyone to want to go see it.

And so, in conclusion, I believe Keiko Fujimori has the best campaign Peru has ever had, but I think—if she doesn’t win—that the first thing to do would be not to give up, but simply continue with the same brand concept, day in day out, for the next five years.

There are no shortcuts to mnemonic pathways in the consumer’s / citizen’s mind. As much as a company or candidate mirrors a certain desire they have through a clear and emotional brand concept, what is really needed is a longer-term mindset that allows this concept to grow and bear fruit over many years.

Last week, I read a number of articles written on the occasion of the Brexit Referendum’s 10-year anniversary. One thing that struck me, was that nearly every article on the subject seemed attached to the idea of somehow unbreaking a broken glass, i.e., going against the entropy that is contained within the world, rather than studying how these phenomena are created in the first place.

So, with the benefit of 10 years’ worth of similar projects taking root in other countries, let’s take a closer look at the subject from a brand strategy point of view.

The first thing to note is that the Leave side won the vote contrary to all the official polls, contrary to nearly all political and economic forecasts, triggering the United Kingdom to leave the EU, one of the world’s largest and most powerful institutions.

How did they do it?

The answer is simple: selling a political position is no more about the numbers than selling a puppy. If I show you a puppy, do I need to tell you about the economic benefits of having the puppy? Do I need to present you some charts, perhaps? Some statistics and forecasts? In short, some numbers?

Of course not. Well now, you understand something really simple: Leave won by focusing on the opposite of numbers: the unmeasurables.

To really “get” this, we have to look first of all, not at what Leave did, but at what Remain did. So, look at the kind of campaign the Remain side held. They focused almost entirely on the numbers. The entire Remain campaign was focused on things like the GDP and the estimated number of points the UK’s economy wasn’t going to grow by if they left the EU.

And what’s interesting is that the Remain side’s articles are still focused on those numbers: the Remain side still believe the campaign was won on numbers, but that the Leave side lied about them. Last week, I saw a number of articles argue that Leave won because of the controversial “£350 million a week” bus advert.

Say what you like about the bus advert, to argue Leave won because of it is a terrible mistake. The Leave campaign didn’t win on numbers. In fact, they spent most of their efforts staying as far away from numbers as possible, because they were very clear on one thing: a decision like that isn’t about the numbers. Instead, they focused on strongly held principles. Emotionally held principles. Unmeasurable principles.

Leave won because of a strategy that focused on one simple proposition: “take back control”. For context, the EU had felt like a place that was out of control for almost a decade. The Eurozone alone was a complete basket case. Entire countries, whose credit had been guaranteed by their Eurozone membership, were bankrupt and driving tens of millions of people into unemployment. At the same time, we saw millions of people crossing the EU’s Eastern and Southern borders with Turkey and the Mediterranean, without anyone apparently being able to do anything about it.

This perceived incompetence of the Eurocrats felt like even more of a threat to the average Briton because, year after year, more and more control had been ceded to them, with more still to come.

Through a simple slogan, focusing on the word “back”—implying a return to a happier time when the British were masters of their own destiny—an emotionally resonant campaign gathered incredible momentum and won the game for Leave.

Let’s look at another, more recent political campaign that has worked on a similar dynamic.

I wrote an essay on LinkedIn a few weeks ago on the reasons why Keiko Fujimori was going to win the Peruvian elections by focusing on one simple concept: the return of order. Ever since Ollanta Humala—an ultra-left wing former army commander—won the elections in 2011, Peru has felt more and more like it’s descending into chaos.

And if there’s one thing Fujimori has, it’s a family legacy of establishing order. Her father spent most of the 90s shaping Peru back into a somewhat orderly country: defeating the Senderista terrorists and—following two of history’s most damaging bouts of hyperinflation—creating the most stable currency in Latin America.

By focusing on the one single concept everyone associates with the Fujimori name—order—and by leveraging the fact that she incarnates the “return” of order (she’s Fujimori’s daughter), she has managed to cultivate the desire for order through a deep sense of nostalgia, and won the elections as a result.

Now, you may argue that this isn’t how things should be. You may argue that it should be about the numbers. Perhaps, when we’re talking about very important decisions like leaving a massive political block, some other way of making decisions should be adopted that ensures sense triumphs over sensibility.

Let me offer you some examples to counter that argument.

First example. When Winston Churchill made his speeches during WW2, he didn’t say “we shall fight them on the beaches, and the UK will experience an estimated 5% economic growth”. The fight against the Nazis was not a fight about the numbers, but about good and evil, i.e., strongly held principles. Unmeasurables.

Second example. Decent people will likely never join the Ku Klux Klan, regardless of whether they reduce entry fees to their rallies, or whether they give members a 20% special discount at their local diner. Fees and special offers are meaningless, because you don’t support or reject an organisation like that based on anything other than strongly held principles. Unmeasurables.

So, now that we know how to sell the Leave case successfully, how should Remain have sold their case?

Well, much of the premise of the Leave campaign rested on the idea that they were the underdogs in the fight against the big, bad Eurocrats. The British do like to support the underdog.

But the British like something else even more: they like to win. And perhaps it takes a foreigner like myself to see it, but Britain, far from being the underdog in Europe, was actually winning the European game!

All you have to do is listen to the Brexit negotiations that took place between 2016 and 2020: they were all conducted in English. What kind of underdog gets 27 countries to hold their most valuable negotiations in the underdog’s language? In fact, if you’ve ever watched the debates in the European parliament, it surely won’t have escaped you that even front-row leaders like Guy Verhofstadt conduct all their speeches in English.

The English language completely dominates the European Union, and not just in the European institutions themselves. Companies across the continent conduct business in English. Universities lecture their students in English. The European experience, for almost every EU citizen, is an experience mediated in the English language. What the British failed to achieve in the 18^th and 19^th century was achieved so easily in the EU that they didn’t even notice.

I have often discussed languages in my essays, the way they create our sense of “Us”, the way they shape the mindset we conduct our lives in, the way they lead us to accept a certain reality by equating the symbol and the real thing. Prices increase, and we say that they “go up”, a simple metaphor that is so ingrained in the way we speak that it has become ingrained in the way we think. We get so used to it we don’t even see it, just like we don’t see the pixels on a screen anymore, only the pictures they represent.

Once you’re aware of this, there is only one conclusion you can draw: whoever controls the language, controls the mindset and everything that is a by-product of the mindset, including politics.

And this is perhaps the reason the Remain campaign didn’t see the immensely valuable gift that was right in front of their eyes: the idea that English should be the vehicular language across all of Europe was so normal to them, so banal, that it had become invisible to them. As a result, they didn’t see how it could be exploited, both in their actual relationship with the EU, and in their campaign advocating to continue the course and win the game.

My recent essays on Ferrari have led to a number of very interesting discussions. Mostly around the concept of timelessness in design, and on the way desire can be cultivated simply by performing a certain archetypal role in society over many decades.

Of course, the latter implies a certain appreciation of the former: you simply cannot stay relevant (never mind desirable) over many decades unless you understand the undercurrents that transcend time and touch on something that goes beyond the trend. Something that satisfies a more fundamental desire. Look at the brands that do this consistently over 50 or 100 years and you’ll see the fundamentals of human fears and desires, themes that have been resonating since we first started gathering around fires.

So, this week, we’re going to look at timelessness in design.

And the first question we’re going to ask is simply ... why? What is the case for timelessness in design?

If you were, say, a brand that aims to make a sustainability argument the case could be really straightforward: we need to use fewer resources. To use fewer resources, we need our objects to last longer. To last longer, we need them to be timeless. And I don’t mean this in the sense that they should work well for a long time (obviously they should) but that they should extinguish the desire to be replaced with something new for a long time.

There’s a deeper reason, too. If we consider that the true, intrinsic value of an object is in its use, then it’s easily arguable that an object you use for 100 years before it ends in a museum is going to be orders of magnitude more valuable than an object you use for 1 year before it ends on a trash pile.

In the context of an argument I have often made—that we should always seek paths towards hypervaluation—the rationale then becomes: hypervaluation can be achieved by simply designing something to be quite valuable, but over an extensive amount of time.

So, in the context of car design (the reason I’m writing this essay in the first place) we could say that your car should look like you’re going to keep on being in love with it after 10 years the way you fell in love with it when you first bought it. Because, quite simply, if you love your car, if it’s the kind of car that evokes happy memories every time you get behind the driver’s seat, you’re less likely to want to replace it, and more likely to want to repair it.

Which, funnily enough, is exactly the way Hermès have defined luxury for a long, long time: luxury is that which is worth repairing. Luxury is the car you’ll never sell. Even your kids won’t want to sell it. In 100 years, it’ll be considered an antique, which is what brought about the title of this essay: antiques of the future.

Let’s spend some time looking at what you should be doing if you want to design timeless brands and objects.

What is it that makes some objects considered antiques in a hundred years’ time, while others end up in a landfill in less than one year?

Three things.

1. Legacy is part of the answer. One thing many people appreciate about, say, Porsche cars, is how they echo previous designs. Every new Porsche 911 fits in the family tree, the way you fit in your family tree, looking perhaps a little bit taller and healthier than your grandparents did at your age. And so, what ends up happening, is that an increased appreciation for the brand over the years translates into an increased appreciation for its vintage models. A Porsche 911 from 1972 will easily fetch as high a price as the latest models, making it unlikely that more than the occasional few would be thrown away.

2. Biomimicry is another part of the answer. As Frank Stephenson likes to say: “a horse will never look out of fashion.” So, if you’re looking to make products that will keep a certain appeal 50 or 100 years from now, you could do worse than to mimic designs that nature has spent many millions of years evolving into what we find beautiful. There’s even a good case to be made that we find them beautiful because we have ourselves evolved into finding them beautiful. Whatever the explanation, nature has clearly been into the design game for longer than you and I have, so it’s worth taking a few notes there.

3. Myth, I would argue, is yet another part of the answer. And I don’t necessarily mean this in a grandiose way. It just needs to weave its way into a mythologised form of your memories. So, part of what makes an object timeless is if it becomes something that wears in rather than wears out. We all have an object in our house that has acquired its value because of its connection to the people we love. This is the car my father drove on our road trip from Italy to Austria. This is the biscuit tin my grandparents saved their coins in during the Great Depression. This is the cigar box my great-grandfather brought over when he left Europe. That kind of thing.

So, there you go: three levers to push and pull in the context of your own brand, on your way to hypervaluation.

Other people’s newsletters are boring.
Ours is GNIROB.

Subscribe now

For a few years now, I’ve written about the vast blue ocean of opportunity in wine for any brand that dares to break away from the sector’s mimetic pull towards category clichés. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t stop smiling whenever I hear someone is making the jump, whether they’re a client of ours or not.

Vinarchy’s Campo Viejo have decided to sail that blue ocean, so let’s take a closer look.

First of all, a recap: why does the opportunity exist?

Two reasons.

One, because most players in the wine category use category clichés, which leaves the door wide open for any brand that understands the value of differentiation and distinctiveness. The fact that they are clichés is “hidden” from most of the players themselves, who believe their version of the cliché is unique. For example, if two wines sell the idea that they’re different because of their different terroirs, they’re both still talking about terroir. Next time you go to a wine fair, try playing bingo with the keywords everyone uses to describe their wine brand: the list is remarkably short.

Two, because most players in the wine category focus on the 5% of adults in the world who drink wine regularly, not on the 95% of adults who drink other things (cocktails, beer, soft drinks, etc.) but who would probably drink the occasional glass of wine if they found a brand that matched their inner desires. So, there is a giant market of casual consumers. Given that academic studies are demonstrating the vast majority of consumers in most markets aren’t hardcore fans but casual consumers, the opportunity is right there for the taking.

So, let’s start with the first point.

Category clichés turn brands into intellectual commodities, reducing their ability to generate emotional value in the consumer’s mind. In the wine sector, this is true regardless of whether they’re classic clichés like terroir, tannins and tradition, or the trend-tied “missionary” clichés like, say, sustainability.

By contrast, if your competitors sell the place their wine is from in terms of terroir, but you sell a place the consumer would love to be in themselves, you’ve created the kind of difference that cultivates desire.

For example, we see this idea executed perfectly with another one of Vinarchy’s other brands—Castillo de Ibiza—a rosé wine you’ll want to drink at a sunset beach party in Ibiza with your friends.

Now, that’s not to say every wine brand should start to sell their wine in terms of a destination. Naturally, the more people talk about their wine in a certain way, the more that way then becomes a new cliché. So, don’t go looking at your successful competitors and thinking “huh, people like how they look, let’s copy that”.

Where you should be looking instead, is in the consumer’s mind, what I often call “the drinker’s terroir”.

The drinker’s terroir brings us to the second point: that most wine brands seem to just talk to the 5% of consumers who already drink wine, ignoring the 95% who don’t.

And the reason that’s a massive opportunity is that the drinker’s terroir is a lot more fluid than most wine makers believe it to be. If a host at a party asks you what you’re drinking, the range of options is much wider than simple product categories. For example, instead of a “fresh and summery white wine”, you might want a “fresh and summery something”, which could include anything from a citric juice to a gin and tonic. We know this, from the consumer’s end, and yet it’s pretty much a given that wine makers simply consider their competitors to be the other wine makers in their own AOC.

So, flip the terroir: what is a deeply held desire in our consumers that we are uniquely placed to offer them?

Here is one way (among many) to answer that.

Social conventions decided a long time ago that what you’re drinking in public says something about you. Consumers have come to use what they drink as a kind of prop for cosplay: a form of expression of someone they desire to be. Some want to be cool, others refined, some want to play host, others want to be the life of the party, etc.

There’s plenty of room, in other words, for invention and creativity. But it all starts with the consumer: who they want to be, where they want to be, and when they want to be.

Which is why I love the latest Campo Viejo campaign.

First of all, because it positions the entire offering on a single, simple concept: “passion”. I’ve sat in brand presentations lasting over an hour and, believe me, shorter is better. Nearly always, a brand concept you can express in a single word will win the game.

This is especially true for socially consumed products like wine. Because they’ve evolved from products to expressive channels for a persona you aspire to be—like “passionate”.

In other words, products like wine become vehicles for social projection: consumers use the product to project a persona.

We’ve spoken about this before, in the context of other sectors, like watches. Rolex = “success”. Patek = “legacy”. Corum = “courage” (at least, it did when we were responsible for the brand concept).

One-word, emotionally resonant positioning strategies work. Why? Because consumers don’t have the mental space for your brand to occupy much more than a single word, but your opportunity is there to make that small space shine as bright as a beacon.

And to do that—to really shine—what that small space needs, is connections to all kinds of mnemonic pathways that lead to it. Building these mnemonic pathways in the consumer’s mind is how the brand becomes salient when the consumer is looking to express your concept. Which is precisely what Campo Viejo has been doing.

The brand wears its Spanish-ness on its sleeve, so it jumps at opportunities to develop distinctive brand assets that echo this, for example by writing it “pasión”. Or by taking a colour the labels have been using for decades—yellow and red—but intensifying them to the colours of the Spanish flag. Or by doing other things that you don’t often see in wine, like mixing it into sangria and other cocktails, even a spritz (the alliteration between Spain and Spritzed is a great touch, too).

And, of course, passion is something we already associate with Latin countries in general. It’s a cliché to say it, but the cliché works because, in the wine space, nobody owns it. No wine brand has staked a claim on expressing “passion” (unlike, say, “romance”, which plenty of mediocre wine brands have tried to express in a very clumsy way).

Building on this, Campo Viejo creates associations with other things we conceive of as passionate—in art, architecture, design, music, dance, etc. All aesthetic experiences that can then be used to create a brand world for Campo Viejo. If you look at the video again, you’ll see it’s essentially a moodboard for passion. And that’s all it needs to do: evoke the aesthetic and let the consumer’s mind do the work of creating those category associations.

In summary: great positioning, and great execution. Well done, Vinarchy.

Other people’s newsletters are boring.
Ours is GNIROB.
Subscribe.

Subscribe now

Since I wrote my first two Ferrari essays, a number of people have responded with something along the lines of “OK, but then how would you transition Ferrari to the world of EVs?”

So, that’s what this essay is going to be about: how do we innovate when the very legacy we have built is under threat by changes in the market?

Here it goes.

1. Deng Xiaoping

When Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successor Deng Xiaoping had a particularly difficult task: reverse China’s course of starvation and poverty that Communism was taking the country towards.

The big problem was: how do you do that without provoking another revolution? How do you orchestrate what is essentially a revolution, without triggering fire and guillotines?

Deng Xiaoping was open-minded enough to look outside of China for solutions. He famously said “who cares if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice?”

So, he visited countries whose cultural legacy wasn’t too different from pre-Communist China, to see what they were doing. Specifically, he travelled to Hong Kong and Singapore.

What he saw were city states that were thriving, using simple economic rules that enabled their citizens to create wealth. The kind of rules Nobel-awarded economists like Paul Romer, Daron Acemoglu and Joel Mokyr have been writing about for many years. Paul Romer calls them “charter cities”, new cities that are created with a specific charter. You don’t vote for the management or the policy, just like you don’t vote for who runs a restaurant or what’s on the menu: you just move there or you move somewhere else.

This is how Deng Xiaoping ended up creating new cities like Shenzhen, Xiamen and Shantou. He called them “Special Economic Zones”: cities that were part of China, but where the rules were very different from the rest of China. Shenzhen was a small fishing town before they turned it into a Special Economic Zone. Today, its population is over 20 million people.

Not only has Shenzhen grown into a successful city of over 20 million people, but it’s managed to re-direct China itself towards a future of prosperity: China now has a couple of hundred cities running similar development programmes, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

This is how you harness disruption when you’re a large player who can’t afford what you already have to collapse:

1. Create a small, separate entity.

2. Cultivate it in another garden, so to speak.

3. Let its success direct the rest of your company once it reaches critical mass.

OK, now, the next question naturally becomes:

2. Are there brand strategy equivalents of this?

Certainly. In a way, this is precisely what sub brands are there for. It’s a strategic reason that’s been a bit forgotten for a while now, because too many brands have lost their ability to stay consistent for really long stretches of time. The sub brand gets used for a million purposes instead, many of them impertinent, some of them even destructive.

The very purpose of a sub brand is to allow a brand to navigate change in the market, experiment with future versions of it, and find new ways to “plug into” the consumer’s mind. Because, let’s not forget, the job of a brand is in the consumer’s mind. We are not at home, here, we are a guest in the consumer’s house.

Ferrari is a Branded House, not a House of Brands, and so it might be difficult to put themselves in this mindset. But what would a House of Brands approach be to changes in the market? Well, what did Coca-Cola do when their ingredients stopped being available in Germany during the war? They didn’t change Coca-Cola’s recipe; they launched Fanta. What did Pepsi do when a certain group of people turned out to like probiotic sodas? They didn’t change Pepsi to make it probiotic; they bought out Poppi.

That same way of thinking is what a Branded House in the lifestyle sector has to work with when disruptive change is in the air, only instead of buying out another company or creating a completely separate start-up, the right approach is to start a sub brand that has a very specific purpose of satisfying a consumer who is currently not being satisfied by the mother brand.

Let’s look at a concrete example in the lifestyle sector.

Adidas did it a few years ago with Terrex. We all know Terrex is an adidas sub brand. They even use the three stripes in their brand identity. But it’s both adidas and not-adidas, benefiting from the trust adidas has generated over the decades, but also benefiting from the different culture that can be grown from scratch with a completely different mindset that you’d get from a non-adidas that’s focused, not on urban wear, running tracks and so on, but rooted in the culture that has formed itself around the call of the wild, running in the woods, trekking, camping and forest bathing. “I went for a walk in the woods and come out taller than the trees”, as Henry David Thoreau would have put it.

It’s no wonder adidas understood it: the Germanic culture has a special word for this kind of outdoor activity: “spazieren”. I spent quite a while in Austria when I was a teenager, where “Geh spazieren” was the answer to every teenager problem you might have. But adidas understood that it was a different emotional and aesthetic register to the urban wear brand they’d spent many years building up. Hence, Terrex.

In our first essay on Ferrari, we discussed the strategic reason why Ferrari became a lifestyle brand (to avoid competing with its own products from the past, most of which are still available on the market today). And we discussed why EV was a “quartz movement” for the car industry, enabling any lifestyle brand to enter the car market: Gucci cars, Nike cars, Adidas cars, etc.

But, clearly this is something that takes a while even for Ferrari to get used to. You don’t stay successful at the lifestyle brand game just by extending into other product categories. You do it by understanding precisely what lifestyle brands do when change is in the air. Which, given the ephemeral nature of fashion and aesthetics in general, is something they’ve gotten used to. The idea of creating a sub brand is almost endemic in lifestyle branding.

3. What’s the problem we need to solve?

So, now, let’s look at a specific problem Ferrari has to overcome, by looking at a car brand that doesn’t have this problem: Rolls-Royce. Because, when I wrote in my previous essays that it’s not easy being Ferrari, we can assume there are other brands for whom it is easier.

No luxury car brand has an easier transition to EV than Rolls-Royce right now.

Why?

Because the silence of electric motors is something they’ve been selling since the 1970s. The long-toothed readers among you will remember this advert, created by Ogilvy in the early 70s: “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

For Rolls-Royce, silence was always part of the appeal. What I really love about this advert is that it sells you silence by evoking a tiny sound that breaks it: the ticking of a clock. It expresses quality in the same way that Swiss watches express quality. In many ways, it evokes the same quiet as the “quiet luxury” everyone has been catching on to since Succession hit the screens. The quiet of Loro Piana, Bottega Veneta and Patek Philippe.

Funny how they already wrote “electric” to describe the clock. Rolls-Royce was made for the electric age and they didn’t even know it. They can just carry on carrying on, and stay Rolls-Royce all the way into the electric future.

Not so for our friends at Ferrari, whose products are the opposite of quiet. How many times have we heard Enzo Ferrari say things like “If it’s not a V12, it’s not a Ferrari”?

4. The solution

And, now that we mentioned Enzo’s line about V12s, here is—right for the taking—the solution that Ferrari came up with when people started taking an interest in different engines than Enzo’s V12: the DINO.

Isn’t it funny? In my first essay on Ferrari, I mentioned it as my favourite Ferrari from the past, and every Ferrarista in town understood what I meant. But they will also remember that the Dino was not a Ferrari.

At least, not for the first decade or so.

Dino was Dino, named after Enzo’s son, Alfredino Ferrari. It came with a V6 engine, which is the reason Enzo thought it inappropriate to put the cavallino on it (and you thought Luca di Montezemolo was the first one to utter those words?). Just like Terrex, the Dino was both a Ferrari and a non-Ferrari.

Both a Ferrari and a non-Ferrari... Which is exactly what the Luce is!

It’s both a Ferrari and not a Ferrari. And that’s great. It shows a view oriented towards the changing, evolving market. It shows experimentation. An open mind about what we could do. Great potential, in other words. But it’s also exactly the reason why Ferrari’s first iterations in EV cannot be Ferrari cars!

Ferrari needs Dino to be its Terrex.

Because, as we already discussed, the biggest threat to Ferrari is going to be the lifestyle brands entering the car market in the coming decade. Ferrari’s Luce doesn’t look much like a Ferrari, we can all agree on that. The thing you bought into just isn’t there in the Luce. So, now, imagine Gucci coming up with their own EV. Do you think Gucci’s EV will look “not very Gucci”? Or do you think, on the other hand, that it’ll look like the most Gucci thing ever?

The thing you’re buying into when you buy anything Gucci will be there in spades. Because Gucci clearly know something about lifestyle branding that Ferrari haven’t yet understood: when market forces lead towards commodification of technical excellence, the only thing you can still leverage is the distinctive brand assets that make consumers reach for you, because they make you desirable.

So, to summarise the 3-step strategy I would have adopted if I was in Ferrari’s shoes:

1. Announce a new sub brand—Dino... dedicated to an electric future. Evoke the heritage contained in the Dino mindset, a new engine for a new age. This is a sub brand that happens to benefit from all of Ferrari’s know-how, as well as being a sub brand the most dedicated Ferraristi will resonate with.

2. Open the new sub brand to collabs. It’s a creative brand, different and innovative. It’s the kind of brand that innovates in the open. No Soviet-style “here’s our new car, put up with it”. Create a new brand world around it that’s informed by the Dino heritage, but it’s experimental and new and just the right thing for Silicon Valley billionaires. Let the youth of Dino Ferrari contrast with the established Ferrari mother brand. Dino is allowed to be different from the mother brand. Go for it.

3. Ten years down the line, let the successes and failures of Dino inform the way forward for Ferrari in the electric world, much like the original Dino informed the way forward for Ferrari back in the 70s, when the brand was re-absorbed into the Ferrari ecosystem.

99% of newsletters are boring. Ours is gnirob. Subscribe.

Subscribe now

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay on the change in strategy at Ferrari from a car brand to a lifestyle brand whose flagship products happen to be cars. That strategy is Ferrari’s natural response to their biggest competitor, “Ferrarieri” i.e. yesterday’s Ferraris: all the past Ferraris that are still on the market, which Ferrari’s target audience could buy instead of buying a new Ferrari.

In the process, I outlined a change that EV technology has made possible: the entry of lifestyle brands into the car market. Just like quartz movements enabled the entry of lifestyle brands into the watch market 50 years ago. Specifically, brands famous for leather bags, shoes, sportswear, jewellery, etc. partnering with tech manufacturing companies like Xiaomi to introduce, say, Gucci, Armani, Nike or Chanel automobiles to the market.

Ferrari have, in the meantime, premiered the Luce and, as expected, the backlash has been epic. The share price dropped 7.5% the next morning. Thousands of fans got angry or burst into tears. Even the horse on Ferrari’s own logo threatened to quit.

OK, I made up that last one (thank you, Google Gemini). But what did happen is that Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, Ferrari’s former Chairman, said “I hope they remove the cavallino from that car”.

It’s an interesting time to be in this business, for sure. Although the noise can be a bit overwhelming... So, let’s take a deep breath, focus on the issue at hand and get to work.

1. Brands and cultures

First, let’s create some order around what a car—or any product—actually is: a by-product of a culture. To use the correct 2026 nomenklatura: the product is a manifestation of the brand.

The product is, as it were, downstream from the culture, which is itself downstream from the brand concept. Why are cars from, say, Volvo different from cars from Ferrari? Because the people working at Volvo are not the kind of people who would work at Ferrari. They’re interested in different aspects of design, and that’s the reason why they’re working at Volvo and not at Ferrari.

What are they interested in? Volvo’s brand concept: safety. It’s a brand concept Volvo have been hanging their coat on for the past fifty years or so.

So, before we address the issue with Ferrari’s Luce directly, let’s explore the idea of brand concepts and cultures by playing around with another brand—Volvo—whose concept we understand. Let’s have some fun with it.

Imagine if Volvo decided to “jazz things up a bit” and started a new project to show that Swedish cars can be as sexy as Italian cars.

You can easily imagine getting somewhere with that, can’t you? After all, there is an idea that people have of “Swedish sexy” out there in the world. And it’s definitely a different vibe, a different aesthetic to “Italian passion”.

So, now, let’s imagine that in the few years it takes for Volvo to get this new sexy car design on the road, PR agencies get hired to build up the narrative. Travel and lifestyle magazines start talking about “the Swedish Hamptons” look. Someone directs a remake of “Elvira Madigan” starring Margot Robbie. People outside of Sweden finally discover Stockholm’s fashion district. Did you know they even have their own fashion week? Sweden is sexy!

After a couple of years, they launch this car and it sells! Everyone at Volvo does a round of high fives. Design school graduates who used to apply for jobs at Ferrari now apply for jobs at Volvo, which naturally brings about a change of culture at the company.

But then, imagine that a few years later, sales start dropping. Some other consultants are brought in. They tell Volvo that the younger generation just don’t buy into all this sexiness. In fact, they say, it turns out that the latest generation don’t like this whole sexy (“sexist”) narrative at all.

So, in yet another twist, Volvo then decide to capitalise on some of their Swedishness. Another “brilliant idea”: let’s do a design partnership with IKEA and build a Volvo campervan! Of course! Why didn’t we think about this before? Let’s throw in some of that scandi interior design style, with some extra hygge on top. And make it affordable, so the IKEA-going young families don’t feel they’re priced out of this market.

Can you see how, with all these twists and turns, people might start wondering what it is they’re supposed to buy into when they buy a Volvo? There may be a market for all these ideas, but it’s clear that if you did these acrobatics for a few years, you’d soon end up with Volvos that stopped looking like, well, Volvos. They would operate on a different emotional register.

2. What is the Luce’s problem?

So, now that we’ve illustrated the importance of brand concepts with this folly, let’s go back to our dear friends at Ferrari and the problem of the Luce.

The problem is not that the Luce is electric. You don’t need the sound of roaring lions for a car to evoke passion and sexiness.

The problem is not that Jony Ive is an outsider to the company. Ferrari have worked with outsiders for the past 70 years, most notably with Pininfarina.

The problem is not even that Jony Ive is not a car designer. Plenty of great cars have been designed by people who weren’t car designers. Citroën’s DS, Ami and 2CV were designed by a sculptor. Jaguar’s E-Type was designed by an aerodynamicist.

The problem is that Jony Ive and the team at LoveFrom operate with a different emotional register. They idolise designers like Dieter Rams and his minimalist designs for Braun. They idolise Bauhaus and functional architects who like their designs to be calm and collected. Their idea of good design is design you don’t even notice, because it’s a frictionless and unobtrusive “user experience”.

And, just to be clear, this is a perfectly valid design outlook.

But it’s still a problem, because Ferrari doesn’t do frictionless and unobtrusive user experiences. Ferrari doesn’t do calm and collected. Ferrari doesn’t idolise Bauhaus and Dieter Rams. Ferrari idolises design that takes your breath away, that makes your heart beat faster, not slower. Ferrari, to keep things simple, does passion.

In other words, Ferrari is a different culture. It’s a different culture, originating from a different brand concept. You’re off-brand, Jony!

“But I’ve said the word ‘passion’ at least 10 times since we launched the car!” replies Jony.

It doesn’t matter how many times you say it. Nobody believes it until they see it. So, show it, don’t say it. It’s a rule they teach you at film school.

3. If Ferrari was a film

Funnily enough, speaking of film school, films is a really good way of thinking about it. What film do you imagine this car to be in? Does the world in this film look like Ferrari world? Even if you’re thinking about a design “from the future”, does that future really look like as sci-fi dystopia à la Tron meets Bladerunner 2049?

Speaking of sci-fi dystopias, one of the first campaigns I worked on, thirty years ago, was for Starship Troopers. There’s a scene in that film, where all the soldiers—men and women—are in the showers. And, given that they’re all healthy and fit, you might think they’re going to get a bit sexy. It’s a Paul Verhoeven film, after all.

But they don’t. They don’t get sexy at all. They just talk about why they enlisted in the army. A large shower room full of fit and healthy young people, and all they talk about is their careers and ambitions (“I’m doing my part!”)

Why do I mention this? Because the Luce’s specific way of being off-brand is that it’s basically not sexy. It’s so not sexy, the designers don’t even know it’s not sexy. Jony Ive and the LoveFromers have spent decades designing products for a generation of puritans: young men and women who’ve been told they have to go to the gym to be healthy and fit, but they’re not allowed to enjoy the by-product of being healthy and fit, i.e., feeling sexy.

In other words, the problem is that the Luce has been designed, not by Ferrari-outsiders, but by Ferrari-aliens. Designers who are alien to passion. The Luce is a passionless designer’s idea of what a Ferrari looks like, just like a porn film is a virgin’s idea of what making love looks like.

So, now that we’ve found the problem, what do we do about it? Is this the death of Ferrari?

On the contrary, it’s an opportunity.

First of all, the clever thing about hiring an outsider on an audacious project is that you can always blame them if things go wrong. It’s not our guys, it’s them guys. They just don’t “get us”. Firing them will be easy and the Ferrari brand will remain intact. That’s not to say we can’t work with them, but there are other ways of doing that, and I’ll get to them in Part 3 (yes, there’s a part 3!)

Second, seeing the opposite of what we are is often a really good way to discover what we actually are. If they open their eyes and ears to their fans’ laments, Ferrari will have an exact understanding of where it is they need to go with their future cars, electric or not.

In other words, the lessons learned from messing up the Luce are the best way to ensure Ferrari will know the type of car they should design for at least a generation: just design the anti-Luce and they’ll be just fine.

Is your email inbox boring? Make it gnirob with this one easy trick.

Subscribe now

About a year ago, REN—once the brand leader in the clean beauty category—closed its doors. The company’s rise and fall provides an excellent case for clear and strategic thinking when the barriers to entry drop and your market becomes ultra-competitive. So, let’s take a deeper look.

1. The rise

REN was founded in 2000 by Robert Calcraft and Antony Buck to provide a solution to a problem that the market couldn’t remedy: Antony’s wife, who was pregnant, started having allergic reactions to her skincare products, which prompted Antony and Robert to explore the possibility of an irritant-free skincare range that actually worked.

The premise was simple: skincare that works, made from ingredients that aren’t bad for you. Clean skincare.

In a world where the average functional skincare product will contain anything from carcinogens to hormone disruptors, you can imagine what an easy sell this was. Especially because, at the time, the alternatives made from natural ingredients were mostly perceived as being a bit woo-woo.

What I really liked about REN was the simplicity of the proposition. “Ren” literally means “clean” in Swedish, and I remember one of the brand films Robert showed me about ten years later. Here it is:

A woman goes to swim in a beautiful, pristine lake somewhere in Sweden.

A man meets her in the lake.

They kiss.

They make love.

In full ecstasy, she dives backwards into the water.

Cut to the edge of the lake. They’re sitting together, blissful.
He asks “How do you feel?”

She replies “Ren.”

So far, so good. We have a brand that rests on a simple concept: “clean”. And we have a fun way for the brand to express how that concept feels. How do you feel? Ren. Even though it’s not an actual word in the English language, you kind of feel like it should be. In a previous essay, I’ve talked about words that turn the lights on in your head. Ren is definitely one of those.

Robert talked at length about how he wanted REN to feel. The idea alone that a skincare and cosmetics brand could focus on being a vector for a distinct feeling—feeling ren—was, in my view, the most valuable part of the whole strategy. Because, ultimately, that’s the goal of a beauty brand, isn’t it? Make people feel like a slightly upgraded version of themselves.

2. The fall

I’m going to start this part with a quote from an article by Philippe Silberzahn, professor at EMLYON business school:

“Faced with uncertainty, many organisations need to reinvent themselves. And this is precisely where they risk losing their way. For when familiar landmarks disappear, the instinct is to seek out ready-made models: industry best practices, “professional” management, a purpose statement, ... The underlying mindset is one of conformity as survival strategy. Yet, by succumbing to conformity, a company gradually becomes a pale imitation of its competitors, often a poorer version. It loses its uniqueness at the very moment when it needs it most.”

REN was bought by Unilever in 2015, which pretty much coincides with the time we started to see some very rapid changes in the world of cosmetics and skincare. Chinese manufacturers made it easier for new brands to start-up, the barriers to entry fell, and the competition went up to 11. Purpose-led branding became a trend and multiple beauty brands started one-upping each other on an ever-changing set of virtues and purposes.

Unilever, surrounded by what seemed like unpredictable changes in the market, went into reactive, conformist mode. Having started with a strong conviction about REN, they quickly began to doubt the “clean skincare” proposition, believing it was somehow no longer enough to differentiate the brand.

As a result, they did what Professor Silberzahn described: dropping the strategy and communicating the same messages as everyone else, just to “keep up with the Joneses”.

The advertising and communications started to echo every new trend in the sector—eco, carbon neutral, fairtrade, inclusive, etc.—until the brand turned into an insipid soup of copycatted messages... The complete opposite of differentiation, and the complete opposite of the feeling of “ren” that had been cultivated for 15 years. Notice, in the advert below, the recurring word “we”: we are this, we are that. It’s all about “we” and no longer about you.

Year after year, we saw a loss in brand equity, which eventually resulted in the company closing its doors.

3. Post-mortem

Now, there are two points to pay attention to:

The first is about the mimetic nature of ultra-competitive markets: everyone pretty much copies everyone else and turns to clichés (a.k.a. intellectual commodities) in the hopes of pulling customers from their competitors.

The second is about how to win in such an environment. REN just followed what everyone else was doing; what should they have done instead?

Ad break: sign up to GNIROB and let’s get on with the essay.

Subscribe now

3.1. The rise of mimetic signalling

Let’s look at the first point.

If you’ve paid attention to the beauty sector for the past decade or so, you’ll definitely have noticed it going through what some will describe as a moral awakening, and others will describe as a mild identity crisis. To the point where beauty is no longer allowed to just look beautiful, or even to focus on your beauty being the source of its virtue: it has to be inclusive, socially aware, culturally sensitive, and ideally capable of solving at least one global crisis before being allowed anywhere near your skin.

The weird consequence of all these ideological acrobatics is that, in beauty, the concept of beauty has somehow managed to become controversial.

It’s a bit weird if you think about it. Something that used to be aspirational and emblematic of the sector as a whole is now treated with suspicion. The word itself is constantly under scrutiny, as though beauty should have to justify its right to exist before it can be expressed.

And, sure, some of that evolution may have been necessary. The industry wasn’t exactly flawless before. The fact alone that REN was successful by offering a functional product using ingredients that weren’t bad for you tells you something about the industry’s state before they arrived on the scene: beauty products have no business meddling with ingredients you should keep as far away from your skin as possible.

But by infusing all these ideological purposes, the hordes of new beauty brands have made us forget what it was for, generating what is essentially an identity crisis.

Originally, beauty had a job, and I think REN were spot on with their initial proposition. To use Clayton Christensen’s terminology, the “job in the consumer’s mind” was really simple: attract, inspire, and make people feel like an upgraded version of themselves. It’s an intrinsic value, the diametric opposite of the extrinsic virtues the new beauty brands are attaching to themselves.

Nowhere is this identity crisis more obvious than in how new beauty brands actually look. At the exact moment when luxury skincare prices are climbing into orbit, the ubiquitous aesthetic seems to be a toning-down of anything that might look too indulgent, too refined, too obviously luxurious. Because heaven forbid a product should look expensive while being expensive.

Through this combination of purpose messaging and minimalist packaging, the industry ends up performing an odd trick: charging luxury prices while pretending it’s not doing luxury. A kind of visual disclaimer. “Yes, this face cream is £200, but look how humble it is.”

Meanwhile, outside the beauty bubble, the rest of humanity is doing just fine with beauty and beautiful things. We admire stunning architecture. We obsess over beautifully designed cars. We drool over fashion, watches, furniture, things that don’t downplay their own intrinsic excellence, and certainly don’t let that intrinsic quality be hijacked by extrinsic virtues.

We understand, instinctively, that beauty can be aspirational without being offensive. That it can provoke desire without committing a moral crime. So why is the beauty industry the only one acting like it got called into the principal’s office?

I think it’s something to do with the “swagification” of beauty products that’s happened as the barriers to entry in the market have dropped. The products aren’t so much products in their own right, they’re merch. The equivalent of a T-shirt you bought after a rock concert.

The new beauty brands being launched aren’t brands cultivated by people who are particularly interested in beauty, just like the rock band members aren’t particularly interested in T-shirts, and the barriers to entry in the beauty market are now low enough for them to launch and keep on signalling their extrinsic virtues.

As a result, the sector is now tangled up in a web of assumptions about class, inclusivity, identity, all of which seem to require constant negotiation. The upshot is that beauty has been expanded to include everything except the unapologetic pursuit of beauty itself. Aspiration is suspicious. Refinement gets labelled elitism. Excellence gets toned down, just in case it makes anyone uncomfortable.

3.2. How to win

The upside—because there is one—is that this creates an opening. Which takes us to the second point: what should a brand like REN have done instead?

Well, there is a big, obvious gap in the market for anyone willing to stop overthinking and remember something profoundly simple: humans like to look good.

The beauty industry is old. Older than the wheel. Arguably as old as “the oldest profession in the world”. And through every cultural shift, trend cycle, and philosophical detour, one thing has remained stubbornly consistent: humans like to look good. They want to feel attractive. And, yes, the definition of “attractive” may evolve. But the desire itself does not.

This is basically the same logic behind Jeff Bezos’s favourite business insight: focus on what doesn’t change. Here’s what he said back in 2006: “Everyone is obsessed with what’s going to change in the next ten years, when it’s so much better to build our business on the things that are never going to change”. He was referring to the fact that nobody in ten years (or ever) would complain that Amazon’s customer service was too good, or that their prices were too low, or that their delivery service was too convenient. But it’s an argument we could easily make about beauty, too: nobody will ever complain about being too beautiful.

Nobody will wake up ten years from now and complain their skin routine made them look too good. There is no future where someone says “Ugh, I wish I didn’t look this radiant.”

Which brings us to the conclusion that the real opportunity in beauty today is a brand that doesn’t twist itself into ideological origami. If you’re looking to start a new beauty brand, you could just focus on the 21^st century’s version of what beauty itself has always done: attract, inspire, and make people feel like an upgraded version of themselves

Seeing things through this lens, we can see the mistake many brand analysts have made in the past year, arguing that REN closed down because “clean” is no longer enough to differentiate the brand, and that consumers nowadays want something the brand’s competitors own.

Nobody in their right mind would argue that, say, Volvo’s concept of “safe”, or DHL’s “speed”, are “no longer enough to differentiate the brand”. If anything, the cumulative effect of 50 years of communication discipline—finding ever new ways of expressing that one clear value—is the moat. It’s something that’s near-impossible for any competitors to replicate.

And nobody in their right mind should be telling a beauty brand that’s been successful for 15 years on the back of “clean skincare” that its brand concept is “no longer enough”. The whole point of proper branding is precisely to own a concept that’s short, simple and emotionally resonant in the consumer’s mind, and then keep running with it decade after decade.

Because, in an ultra-competitive market, the only thing of true value is brand salience.

Simply put, if you can be the brand that owns “clean beauty”, and spend 15 years developing that little bit of real estate in the consumer’s mind, you will own a category entry point, a mental shortcut in the consumer’s mind that says “this is what I need to do next” whenever that particular thought pops into their head. Just like “I need a fast courier” leads you to the natural conclusion you should call DHL, and “I need a safe family car” leads you to book a test drive with Volvo.

These mental shortcuts are built over many years of discipline around expressing one single concept and finding new ways to make that one concept interesting.

So, what should REN have done in the face of a rising tide of mimetic new beauty brands? Simple: carry on carrying on, continue being the brand that owns the “clean skincare” category in the consumer’s mind.

And when I say “simple”, I don’t mean that it’s easy. Quite the opposite, it’s one more example of the simplest things being the hardest to do. But it’s the only strategy that aggregates value over the long term, because it addresses the only thing that matters: the intrinsic value we build up over the years by focusing on the one and only job we have been chosen to perform in the mind of the consumer.

PS: many thanks to for originating the idea behind this essay, and for your feedback on every version, too.

If you liked this essay, sign up to GNIROB.

Subscribe now

A few years ago, Frank Stephenson and I were discussing a car that had just been launched, when Frank joked that it looked like two designers who hated each other had agreed that one of them would design the front and the other design the back.

Aside from being spot on, it was a clear example to me of what happens when a car company loses its brand concept: instead of trusting their designers to re-interpret the over-arching brand’s design codes, the company ended up depending on the designers’ own, personal, design values to decide the aesthetic.

It was a bit of an epiphany moment because, for the first time, it was a clear sign that brand concepts matter, and not only in the narrow sense people usually think of when they talk about branding and marketing (advertising, promotion, etc.), but in the very product itself as a manifestation of the brand concept.

So, now, let’s ask ourselves a simple question:

1. What should a Ferrari look like?

It’s a question many people are going to be discussing soon, since Ferrari are about to reveal what the Luce—their first EV—looks like from the outside.

Funnily enough, it’s a question that brings us back to Frank, since he was Ferrari’s first ever design director. There were two things he was in charge of when he was in that role:

1. Designing the F430, FXX Enzo and the other models of his era.

2. Defining the design codes that made a Ferrari look like a Ferrari. The visual elements that would connect future Ferrari models to past Ferrari models. You could call it Ferrari’s “design DNA”, or style guide.

Now, here’s Frank’s latest “HOT or NOT” article for Top Gear, reviewing the new Ferrari 849 Testarossa.

The level of detail and reasoning is pretty much what you’d expect from a great designer who actually wrote Ferrari’s style guide. And the fact that this car is a “NOT” makes you wonder what happened to that style guide in the last 20 years or so.

2. Style guide vs brand concept

The annoying thing about style guides, is that they often feel like the brand is going to be OK when the creative director leaves the company (“hey, just follow these instructions”) but they quickly stop being used when a new team takes the reins. And if they’re not used, it’s mostly because they tell you what things should look like without telling you why they look the way they do.

To illustrate the point, think about someone in your life whose style you really like. If you pay attention, you’ll quickly notice that their style isn’t so much a fixed set of items they always wear. It’s not even a general colour palette. It’s more that they have a point of view. Their point of view dictates their aesthetic. If you wanted to emulate them, copying their aesthetic would only get you so far. What you’d really need to copy is not how they look, but how they see.

However, a brand is more than a person. A real, lasting brand signature is not an aesthetic, but it’s not one person’s point of view either, no matter how iconic they are. A real, lasting brand signature is its concept.

The brand concept brings about a culture—distributed over many people, not just one person—which is as close as a company is going to get to a point of view. The aesthetic is a by-product of this culture, and the culture is downstream from the concept.

One classic way to illustrate this might be to look at a car that many Ferrari drivers might buy as their family car—Volvo. We all know exactly what Volvo’s brand concept is: safety.

And they don’t just talk about it in their ads. The designer who might apply for a job at Volvo is a very different person to the designer who might apply for a job at Ferrari. The things they talk about in their meetings, the music they listen to when they’re driving, the pictures on their moodboards, all end up manifesting differently in the sound of the doors, the colour palette on the dashboard, the smell of the seats, the haptic feedback on the accelerator, the shape of the buttons, the texture of the gearstick handle, etc. Everything is different. The aesthetic of the cars is a by-product of this culture, and the culture is downstream from the brand concept.

So, let’s look at the question again: what should a Ferrari look like?

The answer is clearly another question: what is Ferrari’s brand concept?

However, let’s not rejoice at this answer too soon! Framing Ferrari in the context of other car brands might have made sense 10 or 20 years ago, but the world has changed, and there’s something we need to address that many people who used to hang pictures of Ferrari’s cars on their walls when they were 13 will find hard to swallow:

3. Ferrari has long ago stopped being a car brand.

It would be far more accurate to say that, for many people, Ferrari is now a lifestyle brand whose flagship products are cars. Just like, say, Hermès is a lifestyle brand whose flagship products are Birkin bags, but whose revenues mostly come from prêt-à-porter, accessories, scarves and fragrances.

If you go to the Ferrari website today, you’ll land on a page selling handbags, jackets, shoes, sunglasses and accessories.

Ferrari has extended out of its product category, the same way Nike extended out of the running shoe category, the same way Gucci extended out of the leather shoes and handbags category.

This is a pretty big deal for Ferrari. It’s definitely the kind of thing that reshapes the brand’s destiny. So, the first thing we need to ask ourselves is: why?

4. Why did Ferrari jump out of its product category?

The answer is quite straightforward. Ferrari’s big competitor is not other supercar brands. Ferrari’s big competitor is… the ever-growing second-hand Ferrari market.

Think about it: Ferrari’s cars aren’t the kind of cars that end up in a landfill, to be replaced by newer models. Nearly every Ferrari ever made is still in circulation. Which means that every new car produced by Ferrari has to compete not only with other car brands, but with all the cars Ferrari itself has produced since 1947!

If we give this market a name, we’ll be more aware of it as a direct competitor. So, let’s call it ”Ferrarieri” (as in, “tutte le Ferrari di ieri”, all of yesterday’s Ferraris). Here is one of Ferrarieri’s most beautiful models: the Dino.

It was named after Enzo’s son. Its price tag today puts it in direct competition with many new Ferrari models. And it’s by far the most desirable classic car, ever.

Now, Ferrari is a company whose business model has always been based on the development of scarcity. To quote Enzo Ferrari himself: "Ferrari will always deliver one car less than the market demands."

But you don’t get to do that with 350,000 Ferrarieri cars in circulation, any one of which could become available to a buyer with sufficient funds.

So, this is clearly a problem. Ferrari’s target audience, i.e. customers who want and who can afford a Ferrari, can either:

- buy a new Ferrari.

or

- buy a Ferrarieri built between 1947 and yesterday.

Is there a way to stop Ferrarieri stealing Ferrari’s customers away? No, and neither would we want that to happen, of course, since Ferrari depends on this legacy to sustain its perception of value.

So, then, is there a way Ferrari can benefit from the existence of its competitor, Ferrarieri?

Yes, there is. Leverage the emotional pull of Ferrarieri’s most desirable cars—an iconic heritage that only Ferrari has access to—and place them at the top of the Ferrari value pyramid. Then, build a world of products around them that the target audience always wants more of e.g. seasonal fashion collections, fragrances, etc.

As you can see in the images below, it’s not new Ferraris selling the clothes, shoes, handbags and sunglasses.

So, now that we’ve rationalised the category extension for Ferrari, let’s look at category extensions for a minute.

5. Category extensions

Many years ago, I used to work for Severin Wunderman, who owned Corum, the Swiss timepieces brand. Before buying Corum, Severin owned the licence to make Gucci timepieces. He bought the licence from Gucci in 1972 for less than a million, and sold it back to Gucci Group (who I’ve also worked for) in the mid-90s, for roughly $300 million.

Now, the reason Aldo Gucci sold the timepieces for less than a million is simple: he didn’t think it was worth very much. How many people would realistically buy a watch from a company known for its shoes and handbags?

The answer, as it turned out, was “a lot”. In 1974, the Gucci Model 2000 broke the Guinness world record for bestselling watch, ever.

It’s a question that touches on what we’re going to discuss in a minute: how many people would buy a car from a company known for its shoes and handbags?

My answer is “a lot”. A Gucci car would break the world record for bestselling car.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Aldo Gucci clearly thought there would be a market for Gucci timepieces, but he didn’t imagine it’d be as big as it ended up being. He pre-ordered a lot of watches from Severin to sell in the Gucci stores themselves. In fact, the cheque he signed for his pre-order was bigger than the price Severin paid him to buy the licence. But the reason that cheque was bigger is simple: he just didn’t see much value being given away in the licence. Nobody then—not even Aldo Gucci—could have imagined that Gucci would have to pay $300 million to buy it back 25 years later.

The question, then, is: how far can category extensions go?

Well, imagine a category Nike hasn’t entered yet, like hotels. With a brand concept like “Just Do It”, we know exactly what a Nike hotel would look like and what we could expect from it, don’t we? The gym would take centre stage. You’d stay at the hotel for the training camps. The best rooms would have a view of a running track, where you’d see Olympic athletes training in the morning.

There is clearly a lot that can still be done in category extensions…

6. A “quartz movement” for cars

What would have to change for lifestyle brands to extend into cars?

Well, what has stopped them from extending into cars so far?

The answer: making cars is very difficult. It’s generally considered near-impossible for non-car brands to enter the market. Even Apple, a company full of competent engineers, tried it and failed to make the numbers work for them.

My contention is that this era is over. The car world is entering a similar situation as the watch world did when quartz movements blew everyone out of the water.

The moment quartz appeared in the watch industry, the game was up: any watch could keep accurate time forever, easily and affordably. Problem solved. The holy grail of seeking ever better performance became irrelevant overnight.

The Swiss called it the “quartz crisis”, because most players in the sector spent 20 years in the red while they tried to figure out what to do about the fact that a $10 Seiko could tell the time more accurately than a $1,000 Swiss watch.

This massive disruption enabled any lifestyle brand from outside the watch sector to enter the sector, launching watches just like they launched shirts, bags or shoes. Nike and Armani’s watches, for example, use quartz. Most Gucci watches use quartz.

And the reason lifestyle brands did that is because they knew something that watch people apparently did not: nobody buys a $1,000 watch to tell the time.

The same will, I believe, happen to the car industry. On the one side will be the luxury car brands we all know. On the other side will be cars launched by brands like, say, Nike, or Armani, or Gucci.

So, in light of all this, we can see Ferrari’s big problem coming up on the horizon. It’s the entry of lifestyle brands into the car market. Companies known for their shoes and handbags entering the car sector, just like they entered the watch sector 50 years ago.

7. The end is nigh (for some)

Why do I believe this will happen? Because we have seen the first symptoms of this change already: Xiaomi—a smartphone and electronics company—built the SU7, an affordable electric car.

It’s a really good car in terms of performance: 0 to 100 in 3.1 seconds! We’re talking Ferrari Purosangue performance at 1/10th of the price. And you get a great driving experience, enhanced by great technology (as you’d expect from a technology company...).

Now, you can argue the SU7 copied its looks from McLaren, Porsche and Mercedes, but that’s precisely what puts Xiaomi into a favourable position for what’s coming next: producing cars with a partnering lifestyle brand. Xiaomi will be the Severin of Gucci Automobiles. Or if Gucci won’t play, imagine Xiaomi producing a car with Nike, with a uniquely Nike-like approach to the way it looks and performs.

The first lifestyle brand to do it will have the same effect on the market as Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had on Mount Everest: signalling to the world that it could be done.

The moment this happens, two things will follow:

1. some car brands will collapse, because the only thing they could offer is something you can get from any EV. Just like quartz made us realise people don’t really buy a luxury watch to tell the time, so EVs will make us realise people don’t really buy a luxury car to go from 0 to 100 in 3 seconds.

2. other car brands will survive and prosper, the same way Cartier, Rolex, Patek and Tiffany survived and prospered after the quartz crisis. They’re the ones with a clear and resonant expression of a brand concept you’re buying into.

We see the latter most clearly in a brand like Rolex: a clear and resonant brand concept: “success”. You see it in the latest slogan (”Reach for the crown”), you hear it in the podcasts, where every guest they have talks about their road to success. Rolex has spent 70 years cultivating this concept into a culture. And it shows.

8. Conclusion

So, where does this leave us with Ferrari?

We’re going to hear a lot of noise when the Luce is launched. Armchair generals telling us the brand is dead because it’s an electric car, or because Jony Ive designed the interior and it looks like an iPhone, or because Marc Newson designed the exterior and, oh, he’s not a car designer. Never mind that one of the 20th century’s most desirable cars—the Citroën DS—wasn’t designed by a car designer either. Flaminio Bertoni was a sculptor.

Ultimately, the thing you have to do is transcend all the short-termist noise, transcend all the change and, echoing Jeff Bezos, ask yourself: what are the things that are not going to change in the next few decades? Since we mentioned Rolex, they’re actually a good example of this: one thing that is not going to change is people’s desire to express success. Whether they do that with an Oysterquartz or an Oyster Perpetual is almost irrelevant, as long as that specific desire is expressed through it.

Among the “things that are not going to change” is one thing that Ferrari has in spades. It will make all the difference and that nobody seems to be talking about very much.

Ferrari have been here before.

It’s somewhat known among Ferrari enthusiasts that Enzo Ferrari didn’t really care much about road cars. He only built road cars to pay for his real passion: racing.

The racing wasn’t paying for itself, but there seemed to be plenty of wealthy people willing to buy really fast road cars... which, when you’ve got a team of amazing engineers who can build the fastest racing cars in the world, isn’t that difficult to do.

Viewed from this perspective, Ferrari is not a “business”. It’s more of an obsession in search of a way to pay for itself. And that obsession is something Enzo Ferrari had so much that he infected everyone working for him with it.

If you think about it, that’s the most authentic way you can imagine a brand concept trickling down into a culture, which then forges the point of view we spoke about at the beginning of this essay. The products are merely by-products of this point of view.

Ferrari spent 70 years cultivating this obsession into cars that make customers believe they’ve found something better than sex. And, just like the road cars were a way for Enzo Ferrari to pay for that obsession, Ferrari have now found a way to continue paying for that obsession by launching a world of desirable products around it. As long as that obsession itself exists in the customers, as long as they see that part of themselves expressed through the brand, Ferrari will be just fine.

I was recently invited into a start-up’s pitch when, near the end of the presentation, the founders started going through the numbers, which—as you’d imagine—lead to lots of doubts and disagreements from most of the investors, until the most respected of them asked everyone to just shut up about the numbers and go back to discuss the concept.

I was really happy he did that because, in my experience, a start-up’s numbers don’t really tell you anything. Whether it’s going to have one hump or two, it’s going to be a big animal and that’s all that matters at this point.

So, to get into this mindset, let’s imagine an investor trying to estimate the value of two companies ten years from now.

On one side, they have a large, established business with decades of spreadsheets, book value, EBITDA, free cash flow, dashboards, charts, committees, subcommittees, and several people whose only purpose is forwarding PDFs.

On the other side, they have you: a start-up with very little historical data, but a brilliant product and a lively community of genuine fans who can’t stop talking about them.

Which company will be worth more in ten years? If you’re focusing on numbers, there’s no way to tell. Because all the numbers the big company as describe the past. There’s no numbers for the future. That’s what makes it the future.

That, right there, is your start-up’s advantage.

Large corporations are forced to work with measurable inputs and outputs. Every pound a marketing director spends must eventually be translated into a tidy performance metric to justify their continued access to oxygen. So, they rely on what happened yesterday to decide what to do tomorrow.

This is their weakness: they’re driving full speed into the future while staring into the rear-view mirror.

Meanwhile, as a start-up, you have the rare privilege of not being trapped by metrics at every turn. You barely have a dashboard, you don’t even have doors, never mind a rear-view mirror!

Good. That means you can focus on what’s actually in front of you.

You can feel this difference most clearly in how big companies approach “community”. They build loyalty with offers. Join our members club for exclusive access to seasonal promotions and selected discounts! Because, clearly, nothing ignites human passion quite like selected discounts. You can almost hear the quarterly presentation: “Engagement rose 14% after we gave away a tote bag.”

It’s a fake community because they’re measuring the wrong things to begin with. Small companies that understand themselves don’t need discounts to create fans.

Think back to the bands you loved as a teenager. Why did you love them? Was it because they offered 10% off merchandise for newsletter subscribers?

Of course not. You loved them because the music sounded like your private thoughts. Because the singer looked impossibly cool brushing hair from their eyes while insulting an interviewer. Because someone you fancied loved them first. Because they came from a city you romanticised. Because they represented a version of life that felt different and alluring.

Notice something important: none of that was measurable. No spreadsheet can quantify longing, identity, belonging, taste, obsession, or wanting to become the sort of person who listens to that band. And yet those forces move markets every day.

The music industry has always understood this better than most. That’s why A&R people work the way they do: they’re not hunting balance sheets, they’re hunting electricity. They know the odds of finding the next Lady Gaga are absurdly small. But if they can find that strange, magnetic force that makes fans rally around artists like Wilco, Pavement, or Röyksopp, they’ll find something far more valuable than a quarterly spike: durable affection. And, in today’s world, a tiny label with taste can spot that just as well as a giant corporation.

This brings us to another beautiful feature of the unmeasurable: it creates the perfect conditions for asymmetric warfare.

As a start-up, getting people to love you is possible You can be personal. Distinctive. Slightly weird. Intensely thoughtful. Generous in ways that don’t fit neatly into reporting software. You can become the brand people feel clever for discovering.

Big companies struggle with this. They can absolutely buy awareness, but love is ruinously expensive when purchased through campaign budgets and approval chains. Before they can attempt anything interesting, someone needs forecasts, benchmarks, ROI models, stakeholder sign-off, legal review, and Trevor from Finance asking if whimsy can be depreciated. By then, the moment is gone.

So, use your advantage. Do the thing that can’t be easily measured, copied, or approved in triplicate. Create the atmosphere, identity, taste, intimacy, or devotion that large companies can’t manufacture without spending millions trying to imitate what came naturally to you. Make that thing the reason people buy from you in the first place, and watch the big corporations spend billions trying unsuccessfully to replicate it while you ride your wave to success.

PS: speaking of unmeasurables, did you know GNIROB was free?

Subscribe now

I first came across the concept of nation branding when I was around the age of 7. My father had been working for the outgoing President Leone of Italy for a while and explained to me one of the mandates of the Ministry of Culture created in 1974.

In his own words: “First, people will fall in love with Verdi and Michelangelo. Then, they will fall in love with Italy. Then, they will fall in love with everything Italy has to offer: wine, cars, clothes, vespas, even mozzarella”.

Michelangelo selling mozzarella. It made little sense to me at the time, but I did feel like I had been let into a secret that would make me feel like a cynical outsider, no matter what country I was in: beautiful as many nations’ cultures are, they are often diverted and re-structured by governments. They do this to cultivate desire and attachment, just like the best brands we all know and live with in our lives.

As I grew up, I heard many people criticise this commercialisation of culture. Especially at universities like Bologna and Urbino that focused on semiotics—which in many ways is the very study that provides the foundations of brand practice.

But the necessity for a “brand Italy” was clearly there, and its positive impact on the wellbeing of millions of Italians is undeniable.

Before the 70s, there was very little love for Italy abroad. There were a lot of stereotypes about Italy being a chaotic country of mafia, mummy’s boys, lazy people, bicycle thieves, etc. And this negative view generated very little demand for anything made in Italy. So, before the concept of “Made in Italy” could be created, the brand concept that underpinned it—“brand Italy”—had to be created.

Brand Italy’s proposition was very simple: love. For every product, there was an Italian brand that made it with love.

Now, you can talk about love in dozens of different ways. The love of family as expressed in a family business. The love that the craftsman puts into his work. The love of the land as expressed in the produce and in the foods we cook with it. And so on. But it’s all just different facets, different forms of expressing the concept of love, which is very simple.

It’s very simple, and it worked. I’ve often spoken about the way Top Gear’s episodes on Alfa Romeo are different to all the others. For every car on the show, we get to hear numbers: speed, horsepower, torque, acceleration, etc. But when they get into an Alfa Romeo, all they can talk about is opera, art, beauty and, well, love.

But it’s not just cars. It’s everything.

Just look at the phenomenal quantities of Italian exports across the board. Wine; olive oil; balsamic vinegar; cheese; prosciutto; pasta by Rana and Barilla; sauces by Mutti and Saclà; coffee by Lavazza and Illy; coffee machines by Zanetti and Bialetti; cars by Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Lancia, Lamborghini and Fiat; motorbikes by Ducati, Piaggio, Aprilia, Benelli, Malaguti and Moto Guzzi; shoes by Berluti and Ferragamo; handbags by Gucci and Bottega Veneta; dresses by Pucci and Missoni; silk by Ratti and Mantero; fragrances by Acqua di Parma and Santa Maria Novella; jewellery by Buccellato and Pomellato; woolwear by Loro Piana and Brunello Cuccinelli; kitchenware by Alessi and Smeg, etc. Brand Italy plays a key role in all of them.

Subscribe now

Now, unlike my last essay on Made in Italy, I want to contrast this with France’s nation brand, because it highlights what happens when you keep things simple, emotionally resonant and uniquely yours.

France, too, has a Ministry of Culture. They’ve had it for much longer than Italy and, historically, it’s been much better funded. Where Italy had to make do with shoestring budgets, France spent more on culture than many countries’ GDP.

Just looking at film, Jack Lang—France’s Minister of Culture throughout most of the ‘80s—spent an annual 500 million francs on direct film funding, compared to Italy’s roughly 150m. He left government for a couple of years in 1986, but returned in 1988 to spend even more: of the 94 films funded directly by the French Ministry of Culture in 1988, only 14 had a budget under 5 million francs.

And yet, Italy’s exports exceed France’s exports, despite France’s GDP being more than a trillion Euros bigger. Even in terms of gastronomy—a pillar in France’s nation brand—Italy’s cuisine is by far the most popular around the world. In almost any city on Earth, Italian restaurants outnumber French restaurants more than 10-to-1. In almost any kitchen cupboard on the planet, Italian food brands outnumber French food brands more than 10-to-1.

Why is this? Why did Italy produce a commercial hit on a shoestring budget, while France had to spend so much to reap so little?

Because France had a lot of coats, but no coathanger to hang them from. France’s nation brand didn’t have a concept to hold it all together for you to get it. Let alone such a resonant concept like love. Let alone a concept that could underpin the quality of every product in just about every category from food to fashion, because everything that is made with love will be consumed with love in the consumer’s heart. People who drive Italian cars and vespas aren’t ambivalent about them. They love them. People who own Italian furniture love their furniture. People who wear Italian shoes and bags love their shoes and love their bags. People who eat Italian food love their food.

So, what do we learn from this for our own brand strategy?

First, keep it simple. Stick to just one thing. Italy’s entire nation brand strategy was built on a single word: love.

Second, make sure it’s something authentic: the brand director’s job is not always to invent, but to discover. This is particularly true for brands that have a long heritage, as most luxury brands do.

Third, make it emotionally resonant. Just like with Alfa Romeo cars: it’s never about the numbers.

There are some interesting moments in history that don’t get talked about nearly enough. Moments when, as a result of a sudden change in cultural values, hypervaluation happens right in front of our eyes.

In 1813, Prussia was at war against Napoleonic France.

To fund this expensive war, the Prussian Royal Family came up with an interesting concept: they issued steel jewellery that citizens in Berlin could exchange for their gold jewellery. On this steel jewellery was marked the sentence “Gold gab Ich für Eisen”—I gave gold for iron—a clear signal of the wearer’s patriotism.

This phenomenon has been repeated a number of times throughout history. In World War I, when Germany started running out of gold to pay for cannons, they issued rings with the same line for people to swap their golden wedding rings.

The function of jewellery has always been that of a 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹. In a way, it almost doesn’t matter what materials you make it from, as long as the right signal is being emitted. For example, when M and I got engaged, I offered her a rubelite ring, and she cut off a few hairs and wrapped them around my ring finger.

The signal is the thing. Usually we don’t notice this so much, because the signal stays constant. It’s just part of the matrix of value, as invisible to consumers as water is to a fish. But just as some fish are quite sensitive to changes in density of the water, so it is through sudden changes in our value matrix that we realise there was a signal at all.

Which means that, when lab-grown diamonds become commonplace, the difference between a low-priced diamond necklace and a high-priced diamond necklace will likely have nothing to do with the diamonds themselves, and everything to do with signals.

This de-coupling from any notion of “intrinsic value” is not that unusual. After all, you’re not paying 100 million for a Picasso because of the price of the raw materials.

This is one of the reasons I never liked the name the lab-grown diamonds industry gave to their product: “lab-grown” is quite alien to the signals people like to emit when they wear jewellery.

What’s more, the sector’s opponents immediately have the mental hooks they need to oppose its endorsement: “Lab-grown diamonds are artificial. They’re fake copies of the natural diamonds we work so hard to mine.” Immediately, an opposition is created in the consumer’s mind between “mined diamonds are real” vs. “man-made diamonds are fake”.

Which is a shame, because luxury consumers tend to appreciate man-made products just fine, as long as they’re framed around the concept of craftsmanship and precision, rather than “labs” which frame the concept of artificiality in the same way as artificial ingredients in our food.

Notice how we appreciate “cultured” pearls rather than natural ones, for example.

So, taking our cue from the cultured pearls industry, “cultured diamonds”—the phrasing, the concept, everything—was right there for the taking. It still is, of course, if you’re feeling brave...

More broadly, you could say that today’s humans are signalling animals who often pretend that their signals are not signals. Another way of putting it is that we’re essentialists who pretend to be materialists. Somewhere on Earth, there is a human who bought the Omega Speedmaster watch Neil Armstrong wore on the moon at a far greater price than all the other Omega Speedmaster watches, despite looking exactly the same as all the others. As long as this remains the case, I will disagree with anyone who claims that luxury is materialistic: a materialist would never do that.

Often, when I discuss these subjects with clients, I end up returning to the same conclusion: all value is subjective.

One book that never makes it on any Marketing MBA’s reading list is Ludwig von Mises’s “Human Action”. It’s not strictly speaking a marketing book, but it is almost entirely dedicated to the subjectivity of value. And, I’d argue, it should not only be compulsory reading for marketers, but even more so for designers: one way you can tell if someone is a really thoughtful designer, is if you hear them re-framing the current product’s subjective attributes before putting pen to paper. Sometimes, all you need is to re-frame the perceived negative attributes in order to create new value.

PS: speaking of compulsory reading,
have you signed up to GNIROB yet?

Subscribe now

Remember the crush you had on that popstar when you were a teenager? Try to write down the reasons for your crush. Most likely, it’ll be something ineffable. Some kind of weird combination of disparate elements. Their poise. The way they stood, sat or moved. The way they flicked their hair, ...

Humans are emotional animals. We like things for reasons that are mostly ineffable and unmeasurable.

Imagine, for example, that you met the love of your life on a train: would you want your journey to be over quicker? Or would you want it to last all night so you could spend more time getting to know each other?

Trainlines can’t guarantee you’ll meet the love of your life on them, of course, but what if everything on board was designed with the sole purpose of being beautiful? A place you actually want to be in? A place you look forward to be in? A few years ago, I took Belmond’s Andean Explorer train from Cuzco to Puno. Every moment on board was a joy.

The weird thing is that it got me to realise there is no reason commuter trains from London to Oxford shouldn’t be equally joyful. If we don’t have the billions to make trains faster, what if we made every second on them delightful instead? How much value could be created if beauty were a KPI?

There is a kind of beauty that triggers a deeply emotional connection, and that creates deep value out of it.

For example, when Frank Stephenson pitched the Nuova 500, FIAT only had enough cash in the bank to keep the lights on for another 18 months or so. So, one of the main reasons they went for it was that the car was going to be built on the already existing—and thus fully homologated—Panda’s chassis. This was the only way a new car could even be developed in 18 months instead of the usual 3 to 5 years. A choice made by necessity lead to FIAT’s best-selling car ever. A massive payoff.

So, the business case for beauty is definitely there.

At the same time, it’s very difficult to put numbers on the effect it will have on your business. Its impact can be orders of magnitude greater than other options, but it’s never going to be an easy pitch in a boardroom, because it attracts a very different kind of investor. One who “doesn’t need to weigh an elephant to know it’s an elephant”, as Warren Buffet put it in one of his stockholder letters.

In that respect, companies focusing on beauty and delight have a lot in common with start-ups, especially the ones that really go for disrupting the entire status quo in a particular sector: investors in them can’t put a number on the business’s eventual value, but they know it could be billions. Precisely because business-by-numbers leads their competitors into a massive blind spot for the things you can’t measure, and the opportunities that come with them.

Beauty in business is disruptive, and very much the domain of the underfunded underdogs. So, if your budget is limited and you’re looking to make a big impact in a sector filled with boring brands, look for the disruption opportunity in beauty and delight.

PS: speaking of boring brands, GNIROB is a substack on branding and design dedicated to the opposite of boring. If you enjoyed this essay, subscribe.

Subscribe now

Before working on luxury brands, I used to design campaigns for films. And it's only when I stopped doing it that I realised how effective films were at teaching me the basic tenet of marketing: the emotion is the product. A campaign's success depended entirely on finding an emotional hook and building some kind of promise on the back of it.

Every now and then, a film would pop up where we'd do a focus group and find out you can break all the rules and still do something very successful.

Pulp Fiction was a classic example of this: nobody in the focus groups talked about the story. In fact… they didn't even remember the story!

Instead, they talked about:

- the "royale with cheese" scene;
- the "I love you, honey bunny" scene;
- the "bring out the gimp" scene;
- the "cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast" scene;
- ...

We had people in the focus groups who'd quote lines from the film at each other. One girl asked "Who's Zed?"; the guy sitting next to her answered "Zed's dead, baby"; and everyone in the room laughed and felt like they were part of a new in-crowd. I had seen a few phenomena like this before (Monty Python was already being quoted at nauseum on university campuses), but nothing quite like this.

So, when the time came to promote Pulp Fiction's DVD release, instead of pushing trailers, we just pushed these standalone dialogue scenes, on the basis that the one great thing about DVDs was that people could watch the movie over and over until they knew those dialogues by heart i.e. the true mark of any self-respecting hardcore fan.

Which brings me to the question of your brand concept, a subject we often discuss in these short essays.

There's a good case to be made that your brand concept is simply the thing your superfans remember when they talk about your brand to their friends. No more, no less. Essentially, your brand concept is your “aboutness”: it’s what they talk about.

So, it's worth considering that, if the thing you want the brand to be about isn't the thing your fanbase wants to talk about, you might just be overcomplicating things. Just like with Pulp Fiction, they're talking about this one emotionally resonant thing they have found in you. What are you talking about?

Allbirds is so boring, people stopped buying their shoes, and the company went from a £4 billion (B!) valuation during the pandemic to $40 million (M!) last week.

So, what exactly is so boring about Allbirds?

Funny you should ask. I actually wrote an Allbirds brand analysis for an investor a couple of years ago, when the share price had already dropped about 10x from its peak and value investors started being interested.

Now that the value destruction has been quantified (a 100x drop before going private) it’s worth revisiting what I wrote, in the hope that others (i.e., you) don’t fall into this trap.

Allbirds is one of the best examples of a purpose brand riding on the back of sustainability.

Now, I’m not here to say sustainable businesses can’t survive. What I will say, is that it’s not a brand concept you can own. “We’re sustainable” isn’t something that’ll make you unique, or bring you any kind of differentiation in the long term. In fact, it’s the kind of concept that will—by your very own agenda—condemn you to become a commodity: logically, if you really want the world to go your way and other businesses to do the sustainable thing, you can quickly see where your problem is going to be: they’ll all compete against you on the same terms.

So, clichés like “we’re sustainable” are basically intellectual commodities. And, as much as you might mean them, there’s nothing to stop people with bigger budgets from pulling the green-washed carpet from under your feet.

Which means you’ll inevitably end up in an “out-agreeing each other” scenario:

—”Ah, but we’re 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 sustainable!”
—”No, we’re even 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 sustainable!”

This, when the goal of a brand is to show the consumer how different you are to everyone else. How can you be different if you all agree with each other?

What’s more, Allbirds made a point of not looking particularly distinctive either. Which made sense for a short while: people in Silicon Valley wore Allbirds to signal that sustainability was more important to them than logos. Great, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of what these signals should look like. Signalling no importance to logos is still signalling!

For example, many years ago, when Asprey expanded from jewellery to become a lifestyle brand, they didn’t want to put their logo on the menswear labels: the only name that should appear in a gentleman’s jacket is his own. Fine, but then how do we know it’s an Asprey jacket? The solution we advocated was a purple stripe lining, which later went on to become a distinctive brand asset: Asprey later released the purple Stripe bag, the purple Stripe tea set, etc. Even the GMT line on the Asprey watch was a purple stripe.

Our rationale for the stripe was simple: from pinstripe suits to school ties and rugby shirts, stripes are the minimal aesthetic unit that conveys Englishness. So, the simplest and most understated way to express the ultimate authentic English lifestyle brand whose brand colour was a royal purple should be… purple stripes.

Understated is not another word for bland. But bland, unfortunately, is the one aspect showing just how much Allbirds was a product of its time—the age of blanding—when dozens of fashion brands thought it was a good idea to just write their name in the same sans-serif typeface as everyone else.

The lesson here is simple: don’t be boring, even (especially!) when boring is fashionable.

If someone asked me to redesign the calendar, I’d start the New Year on 24 March. Between Jesus’s circumcision and my birthday, I choose my birthday.

Cynics will say my over-inflated ego has taken over the asylum. Are we to rename March to Alexary, too?

But, let’s face it, New Year’s Day has a branding problem: its real, lived-in brand experience is very far from feeling anything like new.

24 March, by contrast, is all fresh air and springtime delight. So new!

“So what?” you say.

Well, there’s a phoney kind of New Year’s resolution that only exists as a result of New Year’s Day not matching its claim of newness with its experience. You know the type: vague, abstract, makes you feel ambitious just for having it. Get healthier. Build a great company. Change the world.

The problem isn’t that these resolutions lack ambition, it’s that our short-term actions are often hilariously misaligned with our long-term goals.

Now, here’s something most economists take for granted but most humans ignore: markets are forward-looking. Prices today contain expectations about tomorrow. Want to raise house prices in your neighbourhood today? Announce the construction of a new school to open in three years’ time.

One way to phrase this is that “the future reaches back and grabs the present by the collar”.

So, why don’t we run our lives with the same intelligence as the markets?

Take a classic example. A man wants to be healthy. But every evening in January, he chooses Netflix, beer and junk food. He wakes up full of regret, swears tomorrow will be different, and then—astonishingly—does the exact same thing again! A good, long walk never shows up as an option in the winter.

So, this is why most resolutions fail: they don’t “reach and grab the present by the collar”. They float above life, admired but irrelevant.

There are two ways to change this.

The first way: create a “holy grail”. A goal so ridiculously compelling you’d fight a bear for it. The funny thing is you’re not even supposed to reach it. Its real job is to grab your present by the collar and yell: “Absolutely not, you chaotic gremlin!” when you veer off-course. Think of SpaceX’s holy grail: Mars. Even if nobody ends up gardening on Mars, we still get reusable rockets and global internet. Nice.

Holy grails force certain choices. “Be successful” won’t stop you from doing dumb stuff, but “make all the world’s information universally accessible and useful” will make some ideas just feel wrong.

The second way: make the daily task enjoyable. Humans are weirdly great at this—a species that went from “eat or die” to Michelin-star restaurants, and from “wear this or die” to “this jacket is so me”. If working toward your goal feels as good as binge-watching a Netflix series, you’ll stick with it.

Which brings me back to our Netflix, beer and junk food man. How do we get a good, long walk to show up on his options list?

By starting the New Year, not in the winter, but on that most glorious day: 24 March.

Whenever I talk about the “Made in Italy” brand, people are surprised by the idea that the original mission for Italy’s Ministry of Culture was to serve as the foundation for what would today be termed its nation brand. We tend not to think of our culture as a deliberate construct. It’s something that’s just… there.

So, let’s go back 50 years to look at Italy’s nation brand development.

Back in the 70s, consumers had a very different idea of Italy than they do today. Less Verdi and Versace. More mafia and mummy’s boys. Less Fellini and Ferrari. More Brigate Rosse and bicycle thieves.

Following the theory that everything economic and political is “downstream” from culture, a project was set up to position Italy as the birthplace of everything that is beautiful in Western civilisation.

On this basis, the Ministry of Culture was created in 1974—six years before the launch of the “Made in Italy” brand. During those six years, the desirability of Italy itself was developed through a number of cultural programmes, all connected to each other by the simplest brand concept: 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲.

You can still sense the impact of this today when you see, for example, how Top Gear talks about Alfa Romeo. Every other car is qualified by numbers: torque, top speed, horsepower, acceleration... Then they get into an Alfa, turn on the opera music, and talk about passionate love.

But it’s not only passionate love we’re talking about. Italy is a country of family-run companies, so one tangent became “love of family”, manifested in products we’re proud to put our family name on. Italy is a country of food and agriculture, so another tangent became “love of the land”, manifested in the food we cook from local ingredients.

To push the latter, TV-programmes like “Linea Verde” were created: every Sunday, a TV crew would visit small villages to interview farmers on what they were growing, and farmers’ wives on what they were cooking.

These programmes were initially created because the Ministry of Culture had a very small budget, so they had to piggy-back and do the equivalent of brand collabs with other ministries; the Ministry of Agriculture, in this case. Which is a very interesting way to start up that I don’t think new brands think about enough.

But they quickly realised that the way to your heart is through your stomach (which explains why Artusi’s 19th century cookbook united Italians more than any political campaign). So, food took on a very central role in the nation branding project. After all, we all love our mothers and, when we are born, our food literally comes from her. It’s a very profound relationship. If you transpose “love for your mother” for “love for the motherland”, you can easily see the impact that food can have on the Italian identity, and the power with which it can be expressed abroad. It’s no coincidence there are more Italian restaurants in the world than anything else, and that basic Italian ingredients are to be found in kitchens around the world.

What’s interesting about all this is that, over the decades, this simple brand positioning has manifested itself in ever more complex ways to love Italy, each riding a slightly different tangent of the original concept. And then, of course, there are the countless brands all expressing it in their own way, with their own aesthetics. For every product in the world, there’s an Italian brand that makes it with love, and the list is long, long, long. Just running down the alphabet… Abarth, Alessi, Alfa Romeo, Aqua Panna, Arena Sport, Ariston, Armani, Barilla, Benelli, Benetton, Beretta, Bertolli, Bialetti, Bottega Veneta, Brembo, Brunello Cuccinelli, Bugatti, Bvlgari, Calzedonia, Campari, Carpano, Cerruti, Cinzano, Diadora, Diesel, Disaronno, DoDo, Dolce & Gabbana, Ducati, Elisabetta Franchi, Ellesse, Etro, Fendi, Ferragamo, Ferrari, Fiat, Francesco Rana, Gaggia, Gianfranco Ferré, Giovanni Rana, Gucci, Illy, Italdesign, Kappa, Lamborghini, Lancia, Lavazza, Loro Piana, Luisa Spagnoli, Malaguti, Martini, Max Mara, Miu Miu, Montegrappa, Moto Guzzi, Natuzzi, Nonino, Nutella, Olivetti, Perugina, Piaggio, Pininfarina, Pirelli, Pomellato, Pucci, Prada, Ramazzotti, Riva, Roberto Cavalli, Saclà, Sanpellegrino, Segafredo, Smeg, Schiaparelli, Stefanel, Superga, Tic Tac, Tod’s, Trussardi, Valentino, Versace, Vespa, Zagato, Zanotta, Zanussi, Zegna, …

This may lead some brand analysts to think it’s more complicated than it really is. But the source is still just one concept: 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲.

What can we learn from this? Well, let’s think of your company’s brand team as its Ministry of Culture. As complex as the cultural programme may eventually come to be, it still has to start from a simple, resonant, and original positioning. What’s the one word holding your brand together?

Before I start this essay, I’d like you to take a sheet of paper and write down a list of your five happiest memories.

Take all the time you need for this. The more you remember the way you felt when you experienced those happy memories, the more my point will make sense to you. I say this because humans are quite forgetful. If I asked you for your top five movies, chances are you’d miss some of your favourites, simply because, well, people forget...

Some time ago, I started a lecture on luxury at McCann Erickson asking everyone in the lecture room to do this. Then, we pulled out a few participants’ notes out of a hat, and collectively tried to put a price on the experiences.

The results were quite surprising to all: almost none of the happiest memories were expensive, or even had anything to do with money. Some did come as a long-awaited reward after a period of sacrifice—one of them was winning an olympic medal—so you could say there was a personal price paid there... But mostly the experiences people counted as the happiest memories in their life were free of any kind of commercial transaction.

Why do I focus on this? Because one way to think about the difference between premium brands and luxury brands is that money doesn’t play a role in luxury brands.

That is, premium brands tend to justify the money you pay for their products with very specific benefits. You’ll pay more for this version of the Audi A8 because it comes with leather seats. You’ll pay more for this plane seat because you get 30cm extra space for your legs. That kind of thing.

Luxury brands, on the other hand, don’t go for that kind of measure at all. Nothing specific about the product correlates with the price you’re paying, in the same way that nothing specific about a painting by Picasso correlates with the price you’re paying. It’s just, well, the price you’re paying to satisfy your desire for something deeply subjective, and therefore incomparable to something else.

We’ve spoken in previous essays about the absurdity of putting a Robert Parker-style rating of, say, 93 to Picasso’s Guernica and 94 to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Luxury’s position is that these numbered ratings are just as absurd for everything from wine to jewellery. In other words: it’s not just better, it’s incomparable. That’s why you want it.

So, then, what can brand directors learn from luxury brands?

Well, it’s simple, really: cultivating the incomparable is the very purpose of branding.

I tend to work with this mindset even when I’m working with clients who don’t operate in the luxury sector. Because, once you work from this premise, it’s not just that price is irrelevant for people who don’t care about prices (i.e. the traditional, expensive luxury brands) but for everyone else, too. A swim in an Austrian lake that cost exactly €0 ends up being on of the most luxurious moment in your life.

Your brand doesn’t have to be unique in absolute to get there, but it does have to be the salient option for a specific set of people. The moment you take away the argument that this particular hotel, for example, is the right one for you, you might as well start a price war on booking.com

Now, you have to be careful here, because you might just want to ask yourself if the intangible values you’ve been cultivating are really ownable. Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen hundreds of new brands building their proposition on intangible values. Dozens of brands riding the latest waves of eco-this, or fairtrade-that, or craft-this, or small batch-that. So, intangible values in and of themselves are far from making your product unique or incomparable if they’re clichés.

Think of clichés as a form of commodity. An intellectual commodity. So, a watch made by a Swiss company that talks about, say, heritage and attention to detail is on its way to becoming a commodity if it is indistinguishable from the hundred other Swiss companies talking about heritage and attention to detail. Another grain of rice in a bucket of rice, a.k.a. boring.

So, what to do?

Well, one thing to do is to consider the ways in which someone might just completely love the experience of having your product in their life.

But it’s tricky. You see, to get into the right mindset about how that can even happen, you have to give up on anything that’s measurable. In fact, you probably should suspend the part of your brain that has anything to do with measurability or logic. Which sounds nuts, of course, but once you get into this mindset, you’ll start noticing that companies spend huge amounts of money on things that may be amazing feats of measurable performance, but that nobody is particularly impressed with.

For example, most people who love EuroDisney would probably prefer their rides to last longer. But they would probably prefer the ride on the Eurostar that takes them to EuroDisney to be shorter.

So, if you were the CEO at Eurostar, the measurable and logical approach would be to spend lots and lots of money to get your rides to be shorter. You could easily spend billions doing that.

The alternative I’m talking about would be to get away from these easy (but expensive) solutions, and ask yourself why people want EuroDisney rides to be longer and Eurostar rides to be shorter. And the simple answer to that is that EuroDisney rides are great fun, whereas Eurostar rides are not. So that the successful course of action might not be to spend billions making Eurostar rides shorter, but to make them as fun as the rides at EuroDisney.

What might something like this look like? Well, that’s going to be subjective, but one really good starting point would be to stop thinking of yourself as being in the business of running a train company, but rather as being in the business of making memories.

A couple of years ago, a lot of people were very surprised to read that the richest man in the world was no longer Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but Bernard Arnault, whose company—LVMH—had just reached a market cap of half a trillion dollars. LVMH was the first company in Europe to reach this valuation and, shockingly, it wasn’t a tech company but a house of luxury brands.

Since then, it seems journalists can’t stop writing about the secret formula behind the luxury industry’s success, and LVMH’s success specifically.

All sorts of platitudes have been written about the usual critical factors: high quality, attention to detail, heritage, impeccable customer service, etc. For some, what you really, really need is a great brand story. For others, everything revolves around the brand experience.

While I have certainly advocated for these factors in the past—I wrote a column for Luxury Briefing magazine between 2004 and 2014—today I can’t help but feel like most of the analysis I’ve been reading these last few years is just beating around the bush.

Why?

Because the factors don’t work in isolation. Between story and experience, for example, it makes no sense to choose one. You must work on both, because they feed into each other: the experience frames the story, the story weaves meaning into the experience. Together, they create the emotional resonance you need to achieve your true objective.

So, then, what is your true objective?

Desirability, of course. Desirability is the key to generating deep value.

Here is Bernard Arnault himself, talking about desirability being his prime objective a few years ago: "L’objectif principal n'est ni la croissance, ni le profit, mais le développement de la désirabilité." Our principal objective is neither growth, nor profit, but the development of desirability.

Desirability is a weird thing for your business to hang its coat on, isn’t it?

To start, it’s impossible to measure, which makes it a very difficult topic in any board meeting or shareholder meeting, despite everyone knowing exactly how they feel when desire strikes their heart. It’s the most compelling force in the universe.

So, perhaps we can make a better case for it by analysing its constituent parts. The first part we will call “externally-driven desire”, the second “internally-driven desire”.

Externally-driven desire
Let’s borrow a concept from René Girard: mimesis. Simply put, humans are copying machines. We learn everything by copying those around us. The fact alone that you and I are communicating in the same language is a result of this: humans are born and, by copying the other humans talking around them, start talking themselves. Gibberish at first, then “mama” and “dada”, then the rest.

According to Girard, this mimetic aspect of our nature answers some of the most difficult problems for us. For example, the problem with free will is that you have to figure out what your will actually is. What is it that you want? The solution is written in our evolution as copying animals: we want what others want. Which others? The others we most want to be like.

Mimetic desire is the catalyst of both friendship and enmity. Consider two teenage girls who have grown up next door to each other. They’ve been best friends since they were little, played the same games together, read the same books, listened to the same boybands, etc.

Their desires mimic each other. Sometimes one of them will desire something, which will lead the other to copy that desire, which in turn will confirm to the first one that her desire is correct, etc. People might even laugh about how similar they speak, how they always know what the other one is going to say, etc.

The problem starts, of course, when one of them desires something of which there is only one. A boy in school, for example. Scarcity appears: there is a greater desire for something than the world can produce.

If one of the girls gets to satisfy her desire, this will create a source of envy, resentment, betrayal, conflict. The very force that brought them together, that made them one, now drives them apart. At best (or worst, depending on how you feel about these things…) the girls will become frenemies, spending the rest of their lives trying to one-up each other.

To throw this back into the luxury context, this is how one woman will get on Hermès’s waiting list for a Birkin bag, while the other woman will pay three times the price to skip the waiting list via a third-party broker and purchase the 2023 limited edition ostrich leather model. This will cause the first woman to tell her boyfriend something along the lines of “she didn’t even know about that bag until I told her about it!”

With these words, she will have swapped her standards—and her ensuing desires—for something she believes the other will never have. Notice that, in any scenario, choices are being made reactively, driven by external factors. So, now, let’s look at the internal factors.

Internally-driven desire
Here, we’ll borrow a concept from someone who spent a good 20 years of his life writing about the psychology of desire: Jacques Lacan. What he referred to as “objet a” is the ever-longed-for-and-never-found object (or rather, object-cause of desire) that we feel a sense of loss and nostalgia for, believing we once had it when we were in the state of “jouissance” (ecstasy or bliss) as babies in our mother’s arms, before submitting to language, articulated thoughts, and the messy business of being human.

The “objet a” (pronounced “objet petit a”) is the ineffable object-cause that causes our attention to fall onto something which then becomes the object of our desire. Over the course of our lives, we project that desire onto all kinds of objects and people, believing them to have something special about them that we cannot put our finger on. Quite literally, what we mean when we say that someone has “a certain je ne sais quoi”.

There’s a quote attributed to André Breton that expresses this perfectly: “All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name”. And, since we are seeking an ineffable and impossible object, the more objects we consume that promise to be it—but are not it—the more we desire the real it, projecting our “objet a” onto other objects of desire.

Interestingly, this eternal chase produces in itself a kind of “jouissance”, different to the original “jouissance” we believe to have experienced at the maternal body, which Lacan calls “surplus jouissance”. If you’ve ever heard older wealthy people talking about how they loved becoming rich much more than being rich, that’s probably what they’re referring to, because it’s as close to self-actualisation as you’re going to get in a material world.

Of course, if you think about it, the nostalgia they have for it is as illusory as the “objet a”: it was never there in the moment itself! Their memory put it there later on.

Real, Symbolic and Fantastic
Now, how does “objet a” actually inform us about desirability? Well, one crucial aspect to it is that Lacan places it at the intersection in the Venn diagram of Real, Symbolic and Fantastic. This in itself gives us an idea as to the reason luxury brands have managed to grow so much over the past half century.

Put simply, it’s cinema.

Our ability to experience fantasy (rather than just, well, fantasise about it) has grown ever more powerful and sophisticated over the past 70 years or so. As a result, our “objet a” seems much more “actualisable” to us, since we actually experience some form of it when we watch movies.

In this respect, notice how little was written in the press about Bernard Arnault’s acquisition of the CAA talent agency, when it really seems quite straightforward: film will be the way for LVMH to sustain the relationship between its luxury brands and the public’s “objet a”. In Gucci’s La Famiglia, we spoke about Cerruti’s and Saint Laurent’s love relationship with film. This is what that relationship looks like when it’s taken to the next level and becomes a core business strategy.

Once you start thinking of the film industry as an industry that actualises our fantasies—bringing them into the symbolic world and making them part of the fabric of our collectively shared reality—it becomes quite obvious that its semantic codes, its narrative structures, its archetypes, all serve to feed our desire.

Put simply, if you want your luxury brand to resonate on an emotional level with the public, film is where you should look for guidance.

So, there you have it: a little analysis of desirability for your brand concept to tap into. Hopefully, it will help you put your customer’s desires first when working out how to develop your brand.

My friend Nick Searle likes to walk. “Likes” is an understatement: he once landed at Heathrow Airport and decided the best way to get to our studio in Hammersmith was to walk all the way.

Many years ago, Nick and I were walking through some surprisingly wild woodlands near Holloway in London. After a while, we ended up walking on a path that was quite deeply sunk into the land and Nick said something that turned all kinds of lights on in my head: “This is why they call it Holloway”.

Of course! I had only ever thought of the word as a name, not as a word... A holloway is a path that is sunken in the land. Hollow way!

Many words are like that, pointing at something more meaningful than might appear at first sight. The German word Stammtisch is a wonderful, composite word. A Stamm is a tribe. A Tisch is table: tribal table. A group of friends regularly get together at the same table in a public place, like a pub or a brasserie. The table becomes their Stammtisch.

One week, your friend Bill can’t make it. Another week, it’s Ben who can’t make it. But everyone just carries on. We’ll see Bill and Ben next week: the Stammtisch remains the Stammtisch. Yes, it’s a table, but the word takes it far beyond the physical table and turns into a phenomenon, like the social equivalent of a whirlpool in a river. You could replace the table itself, you could even replace the individual friends over time, as some of them leave town and new faces show up on the scene. The Stammtisch would still be the Stammtisch. If the word didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it, just to point at the phenomenon.

In French, an amuse-bouche is an amusement for your mouth: something light and playful you’d eat with your apéritif before starting a longer meal, just to get the juices flowing. A few years ago, realising that our branding workshops could sometimes be long and difficult, I decided to open them with something light and playful, and called this part the amuse-tête. You should always open a long and difficult meeting with an amuse-tête, especially if you want participants to be playful and creative.

A few weeks ago, I had to come up with a name for this substack, where we examine how brands can become the opposite of boring. Of course, boring written backwards is... gnirob! Surely, this is the shortest, most economic word to describe the opposite of boring. I have a feeling Hemingway (Mr. Say-It-All-In-One-Word) would approve. Surprisingly, the gnirob.com domain name was still available. So, here we all are.

You don’t have to work with composite words to touch on something interesting. Baldassare Castiglione, who wrote the first book on court etiquette, coined the word sprezzatura, which could be loosely defined as “acting like you just don’t care about such trivial things”. If you translated it literally, it would mean something like “unpriceness”. The word embodies a whole way of being that implies, for example, that you should win a tennis match, but make light of the situation and generally appear as if you weren’t trying very hard. It takes a lot of confidence to do that. Gianni Agnelli, for example, had tons of sprezzatura: he always dressed very smart, but in a somewhat dishevelled, nonchalant way.

I suppose it’s precisely because there are such resonant words at our disposal—words that turn the lights on in your head—that I’m often a little disappointed when I ask companies what the concept is behind their name. In the dotcom era, for example, it used to be quite trendy to give your dotcom a composite name, like Razorfish or Moonpig or Strawberryfrog. Quite often, the explanation behind the name fell far short of the explosive energy that lies dormant in such juxtapositions.

The way I see it, if you’re looking for the lights to shine when people say your brand’s name, you should aim for emotional resonance. This emotional resonance occurs because we hear it and just “get it”. It’s the same kind of resonance that happens when we discover a new word that describes something we recognise—a word that should have existed all along, and now that it does, it helps our mind point at this concept in our heads. Gnirob!

I’ve often spoken about our insistence on discovering a brand’s “aboutness” before we can think of its name or graphic identity. One conclusion this essay is leading me to, is that it’s worth thinking of this “aboutness” as a dictionary definition without a word.

Imagine a world where your company’s product has been included in the dictionary, but there’s been a printing error and the only thing on the page is the word’s definition. Where the actual word is supposed to be, they just left a blank space. The emotional resonance of the word you might come up with to fill that blank space is probably worth looking into.

And, vice versa, if your company has a name, but you’ve been struggling to find what it is that consumers buy into when they buy your products, it’s probably worth imagining how a dictionary definition might read next to the word.

Demna’s 𝘓𝘢 𝘍𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘭𝘪𝘢 concept for Gucci got a lot of attention for looking less like a fashion collection and more like a line-up of film characters. The runway was full of instantly recognisable types: the mob wife, the power dresser, the hyper-polished social climber, etc. What made it interesting wasn’t the clothes themselves, but how quickly you understood the characters behind them.

This is something people who really “get” luxury have understood for a long time. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the reason Nino Cerruti hired us back in 1999. When I started working for him, I had zero experience in fashion or luxury, but plenty of experience art directing campaigns for films.

I often heard him comment on the fact that he loved designing costumes for films, because he liked dressing a personality more than a walking body on a catwalk. Interestingly, another brand we worked on for many years—Saint Laurent—have now turned this into their MO: their partnership with A24 has them designing costumes for one cultural hit after another.

People don’t buy products because of what they are. They buy them because of who they become. Estée Lauder said it a million times to all her employees: you’re not selling the product, you’re selling the person she wants to be.

There’s always a gap between someone’s current self and their ideal self, and that gap is where most buying decisions really happen. The gap opens the gate to a cinematic world your brand takes them to, in which they get to play with their identity. Bernard Arnault talked about it in many shareholder letters: the job of a luxury brand is to build desirability, and what people desire most isn’t the object itself; it’s the feeling of being the character who owns it. A handbag isn’t leather and stitching. A watch isn’t metal and gears. They’re props in the film someone projects to themselves about the character they’re looking to become.

One way to think about it is to imagine the consumer as Mario, the Nintendo character, and your product as the fire flower. Nobody wants the fire flower for its own sake. They want the fire flower to turn Mario into Super Mario. That’s, well, that’s the point! And yet, most brands are still obstinately selling the fire flower.

The customer isn’t really asking, “What do I get?” They’re asking, “Who will I be if this works?” That gap, between their reality and their imagined identity, is where your brand’s world exists. When a brand fills that gap, the decision to buy feels obvious.

The reason 𝘓𝘢 𝘍𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘭𝘪𝘢 works is not because the styling is clever, but because the identity is clear. You see the character, and you know whether you are that person, want to be that person, or wish you were brave enough to be that person. That clarity creates desire faster than any list of features ever could.

For anyone building a luxury brand, the takeaway is simple: offer a version of the customer they want to exist in the world as. If you can describe that version clearly, people move toward you without much convincing. If you can’t, no amount of better copy or prettier branding will fix it.

People don’t buy the product. They buy the Self that comes with it.