My car was stolen from in front of my house in mid-March. Third time lucky for the thieves, as it turned out.
The first attempt essentially bricked the car. All electronics gone, and it took Toyota a considerable amount of hard work to bring it back from the brink. The second time, all that went missing was a single small pane of glass. Not smashed. Just quietly foisted out and never seen again. They didn’t even get in that time. But clearly all that reconnaissance paid off, because on the third attempt it took them 117 seconds (I had it all on my Ring) to get in, get it started, and disappear into the night.
So began the hunt for a new car. And while I found myself genuinely fascinated by the recently unveiled Ferrari Luce, it was never going to make the consideration set. I wonder why…
The Brand Caught Between Two Worlds
Ferrari’s relationship with electrification is, to put it diplomatically, complicated. EU CO2 regulations are doing a lot of the pushing, but so too is the relentless pace of the Asian market (in particular, the Chinese brands) which has been plunging into electrification with an urgency that makes European manufacturers look like they’re wading through treacle. What do you do when you’re a brand built entirely on the roar of a combustion engine and the world is quietly but insistently asking you to stop making that noise?
The Luce is Ferrari’s answer. And it’s causing more consternation for its design than anything else.
Here’s my honest take: I actually like it. There’s a futuristic quality to it that, if you squint slightly, feels evocative of Ferrari’s 80s design era: bold, slightly aggressive, willing to be strange. But I can also completely understand the people lining up to say it just doesn’t look like a Ferrari, does it? The complaints aren’t really about the headlights or the roofline. They’re about something deeper and harder to articulate. It doesn’t feel like Ferrari anymore. And that feeling, that vague but powerful sense of wrongness, is one of the most instructive things a brand can produce, even unintentionally.
Because what the Luce controversy is actually revealing is the fragility of brand equity under pressure. Ferrari didn’t get here by making bad decisions (though they’ve made more than a few). They got here by being caught between an identity they’ve spent seventy years building and a market that is moving whether they like it or not. The design is a symptom. The disease is the impossible brief: be Ferrari, but also be the future, but also be accessible to markets that have never particularly cared about your heritage, but also don’t alienate the people who will spend half a million dollars on your car because it is unmistakably, irreducibly yours.
That’s not a design problem. That’s a brand problem.
The Hollowing Out
Brand is a funny thing. You don’t realise what you have until you don’t have it anymore. And if you do know what you have, trying too hard to hold onto it means it slips through your fingers. But doing nothing to protect and evolve it is equally fraught. There is no safe option. There is only the quality of the decisions you make along the way.
This plays out at every level of brand investment, not just at Ferrari’s rarefied altitude. In the age of digital advertising and freelance graphic designers, it is entirely possible to spend cents on the dollar and produce brand creative that looks, on the surface, like the real deal. It presents well in the first reporting cycle. The sentiment numbers are fine. The deck looks fine.
And then, quietly, the hollowing begins.
Because brand equity isn’t built by looking the part. It’s built by consistently, coherently standing for something… and then actually doing something with that. Positive sentiment doesn’t keep the lights on at headquarters. At some point, impressions have to become consideration, consideration has to become conversion, and the story you’re telling about who you are has to be legible enough that people choose you over the alternative.
The brands that skip this work, that treat brand as decoration rather than infrastructure, tend to find out the hard way. Not in one catastrophic moment but in a slow, disorienting erosion. Down twenty percent year on year, looking at the numbers, genuinely unsure what went wrong. What went wrong was that the brand was never really being built. It was being maintained at minimum viable cost while the equity quietly drained away.
Build It And Move It Forward
The right kind of brand work does two things simultaneously. It bolsters what the brand already stands for (things that are genuinely true, genuinely differentiated, genuinely owned) while also moving it forward in a direction that means something. Not just to the brand team. To the people you’re actually trying to reach.
This is hard. It requires genuine creative ambition, a willingness to measure things that matter rather than just things that are easy to measure, and the institutional courage to invest properly rather than cutting corners and hoping the algorithm does the heavy lifting.
Ferrari, for all their current turbulence, at least understand the stakes. The Luce might be polarising. It might be the baby blue love child of a Volvo and a MacBook Pro (my words, no one else’s). But it is, at minimum, a genuine attempt to grapple with an impossible brief rather than simply ignoring it.
Sticking your head in the sand doesn’t protect your brand. It just means you’re scrambling for relevance ten years too late, pushing out product that doesn’t align with who you are, hoping nobody notices the gap between the story and the reality.
As for me, the Ferrari was never really in contention. Not because of the design controversy, nor its insane cost, but simply because a fully electric car isn’t the right fit for me right now. I ended up going with a charming little HEV from GWM. So clearly, I’m making my own quiet bet on where this race is heading.
Maybe Ferrari should take note.
