Elon Musk faces Brand reality

It’s fair to assume that the remarkable Elon Musk knows a thing or two about Brand Management. The success of Tesla is one of the great brand success stories of modern times. The cars are prestigious, original and confer practical and emotional benefits on the user. Almost the Holy Grail for a branded consumer product. Or they did! As we know Tesla sales have nose-dived recently even though the cars haven’t changed. What has changed is that Musk seems to have forgotten that, as Sameena Ahmad wrote in The Economist nearly twenty years ago, brands – even the best ones – are vulnerable. As she put it “… a brand must be cosseted, sustained and protected… a hint of scandal can all too quickly send customers fleeing. The more companies promote the values of their brands the more they will need to seem ethically robust and environmentally pure. “

In his 2010 seminal book “Brand Society” Martin Kornberger said “… there is more and more scrutiny not only on what a company is doing but how it is doing business. Ask Nike or Shell or McDonalds – they can tell you how external parties try to change internal process”. Don’t they just! In my Shell days we had a raft of those “External parties” commenting on us – about Brent Spar, Nigeria, the Environment and a host of other things. Today Shell and the other oil/gas multinationals have achieved almost pariah status. And, it seems, they don’t know what to do about it. They’ve lost sight of the fact that brand and reputation are not a given.

Back to Mr Musk. Perhaps he thought that his brand pre-eminence (at the upper end of the electric vehicle category) was so strong that he was fireproof. Well pride goes before a fall. Musk’s romance with Donald Trump has done the brand significant harm everywhere. Consumers have choice and you ignore tham at your peril. As David Ogilvy once memorably said “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife”. And the automobile is one of the most visible manifestations of your personal identity. Where once to drive a Tesla was cool and conveyed prestige now it suggets that you support the Orange twerp’s best buddy!

Shopping is seen as a form of Surrogate voting. The consumer is sovereign, as Kornberger reminds us. Ask the Sun Newspaper how sales in Liverpool are going! Whilst it is quite rare for a brand to go from hero to zero overnight (though those with long memories will remember Gerald Ratner doing it) Musk has a long haul ahead to re-establish his position – not least because he and the Tesla brand are inextricably linked.