What can a company that sells fewer than 14,000 cars annually teach us about building an unstoppable brand?

Lesson 1: Scarcity creates value

Ferrari’s CEO Benedetto Vigna follows founder Enzo Ferrari’s golden rule: always sell “one less car than the market demands.”

By constraining supply as it is common practice in the luxury industry, Ferrari has achieved what most brands can only dream of: customers who wait for products, pay premium prices without complaint. The result? A 28% operating margin and a market valuation of €76 billion from selling fewer cars than many dealerships move in a month.

Lesson 2: Community or even cult

With 80% of buyers already owning a Ferrari, the brand has mastered the art of customer retention.

Ferrari customers don’t just qualify through wealth—they qualify through loyalty. The brand maintains close relationships with 180 dealerships worldwide, creating an inner circle that makes customers feel part of something bigger than a transaction.

Lesson 3: Customer journey control

Ferrari has turned the traditional sales funnel upside down. Instead of courting customers, they make customers court them. Buyers actually pay to attend trade shows just to qualify for the opportunity to purchase a car.

Lesson 4: Innovation and bold pricing

Where new models used to cost just 3-5% more than their predecessors, the new 12Cilindri commands a 30% premium over the 812 Superfast it replaces.

Limited-edition supercars like the F80 (€3.6 million) generate massive revenue bursts, while special editions like the Daytona SP3 (€2 million) fill gaps between major launches. Add extensive personalization options—which can increase prices by 20%—and you have a pricing strategy that maximizes both volume and margin.

The results speak for themselves

Ferrari’s marketing mastery has delivered extraordinary results: they’ve nearly doubled car sales since 2015 and order books are full for the next two years.

This happens in a context where most carmakers are struggling with shrinking margins and demand challenges.

Your Ferrari Moment

Every brand, regardless of industry, can apply these principles.

Ask yourself:

• How can you create scarcity?

• How can you build community?

• How can you control your customer journey?

• How can you price for value rather than volume?

The Ferrari formula isn’t just about horsepower—it’s about the power of exceptional marketing to transform “commodities” into cult objects.

Is your brand, innovation and marketing driving your growth? If it isn’t today – let’s connect!

Why Many Viral Campaigns Miss the Mark

When virality happens without strategic grounding, it risks short-term buzz but long-term brand damage. Apple’s 2023 “Crush!” ad was provocative but insensitive, undermining its brand values around creativity. Pepsi’s infamous Kendall Jenner ad attempted to hijack social movements for attention, backfiring with global backlash. In both cases, the campaigns failed to manage the conversation effectively, and first and foremost lacked relevance.

By contrast, Duolingo’s TikTok campaigns and Dove’s “Cost of Beauty” succeeded because they bonded with users around shared values, educated and entertained through authentic storytelling. They also moderated cultural conversations with sensitivity. They didn’t just go viral—they built equity.

Take Elf Beauty’s “So Many Dicks” campaign: cheeky and provocative, but rooted in a cultural insight on boardroom diversity. It sparked meaningful discussion, made people laugh while learning, and invited mass participation across channels.

Key Questions for Brand Teams

• Are we creating content that helps our community express identity or values?

• Does the content spark curiosity, joy, or participation—or just noise?

• Are we prepared to moderate the conversation our content may trigger?

• Does the campaign enhance or dilute our iconic brand positioning?

Final Thought

The real power lies in clarity: knowing which job your brand wants to perform and designing content accordingly. In a landscape where attention is fragmented but meaning is craved, the brands that will truly win are those who go viral with purpose—and stay relevant for the right reasons.

Would you like to discuss how this can be applied to your business? Let’s connect

Source: David Dubois, associate professor at INSEAD, HBR article https://hbr.org/2025/05/a-new-framework-for-going-viral

So How Do We Drive Growth Now?

Modern consumer behaviour defies linear progression. Today’s buyer journey resembles a complex network rather than a straight path:

• Discovery on social media, research via reviews and YouTube

• Price comparisons across multiple platforms

• Cart abandonment followed by returns through different channels

• Purchase decisions influenced by peer and influencer opinions

This fragmented, non-linear path challenges our fundamental assumptions about customer acquisition. The funnel assumed control we simply no longer have.

Two Critical Paradigm Shifts

Forward-thinking organisations are embracing two transformative approaches:

1. From Funnels to Influencer Maps

Not all touchpoints carry equal weight across the customer journey. However what has really changed is that each channel plays a role from awareness to conversion and repeat. The efficiency to which each channel contributes is also influenced by the content. Smart brands identify the right level of investment for each step of the journey by channel. They also learn which interactions influence conversion and loyalty most —then prioritise investment accordingly.

This means mapping moments of maximum impact across the customer journey. Product experience and satisfaction, customer service, and word-of-mouth remain powerful.

2. Reach AND Relationships

Reach remains important in the context of top-of-mind awareness of category buyers. To market successfully and make our marketing brand-building brands need to add the dimension of relationship quality—particularly with superusers who are brand enthusiasts:

• Spend significantly more than new customers

• Are more likely to repurchase

• Have greater lifetime value

• Generate more word-of-mouth referrals

Practical Implementation for Modern Brand-builders and Marketers

1. Leverage first-party data strategically—prioritise privacy while building deeper customer understanding.

2. Map the actual customer journey—research to understand real behavior patterns.

3. Adjust your measurement—consider reach, earned / efficiency of awareness, and customer lifetime value

4. Break down silos— align brand, performance, and customer experience teams behind unified action plans and goals

5. Build agile marketing capabilities—to respond quickly to changing consumer preferences.

The Path Forward

The question is no longer “how do we push more people through our funnel?” but rather “how do we create value that naturally draws people into our orbit and keeps them there?”

Would you like to discuss how this applies to your business?

 Let’s connect

Marketers can see AI as their new best friend and support function. It is giving marketers plenty of possibilities to drive business growth more efficiently. It can increase competence, and improve ROI and brand experience behind a data-driven approach and customer focus. However today, it’s essential to maintain human touch and control when using AI to ensure the outcome is qualitative.

1. Customer segments

   Customer segments: AI can help identify distinctive customer groups amongst customers allowing for a better understanding and relevant communication.

2. Consumer insights

   AI can enable marketers to gather, analyze, and interpret vast amounts of data from various sources uncovering customer behavior and preferences.

3. Predictive analytics

   Thanks to AI, sales or behavioral trends can be identified faster guiding product and communication development.

4. Personalised content at scale

   Using AI to create communication plan outlies, product descriptions, and other copy enables great efficiencies today. Copy generation is more advanced compared to visual work, but for sure imagery capabilities will develop swiftly.

5. A/B testing optimization

   AI can accelerate A/B testing processes by quickly analyzing different variables and finding the most effective combinations, improving campaign performance.

6. Dynamic pricing

   Analyses of market conditions, demand, and competitor pricing make AI a great support function for business decisions.

7. Improved lead generation & hyper-targeting

   Advertising platforms that are powered by AI can leverage patterns in customer and market data to segment and target relevant audiences. They enable precise targeting based on client interests, behavior, and demographics, leading to better ad performance.

8. Social media management

   AI can help in social media monitoring and management, identifying relevant conversations, sentiment analysis, and proposing responses.

9. Customer service

   AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can provide instant customer support and answer queries. Today, it’s still recommended that the answer is reviewed by a human before responding to the customer. However, query management and response time can be significantly improved.

What does an investor mindset mean?

Marketing is meant to deliver profitable business growth and therefore, budget conversations should focus on the investment needed to achieve the growth ambition, instead of only debating the cost.

Where to begin?

Always be data-based, and analyse the available data. Understand which marketing investment has delivered profitable business growth and which one hasn’t. Go one step further and understand the reason for this result – the “why”- to draw the right conclusions.

Propose a plan that:

1. Invests in activities that have driven growth

2. Cuts ineffective spending and re-invests in proven high-growth plans

3. Tests & learn to prove effectiveness based on a pay-as-you-go approach.

Key Principles – leveraging insights from Les Binets, Peter Field & Bryan Sharp

• Address the whole market (new & existing customers) to grow sales – brands grow by converting new buyers (who are already in the category) but selling to existing customers is typically more cost-effective.

• Combining long short-term investment is proven to be the most effective over time – 60% brand building and 40% sales activation has shown to deliver the optimum effects, with up to 2 x efficiency vs. investing in one or the other. Short-term activations (e.g. promotions, performance marketing) are vital for efficiency. But long-term brand building drives growth and profit, also by reducing price sensitivity.

• Leverage famous and creative communication: Campaigns that reach fame are up to 4 x more effective and accelerate success.Creative campaigns deliver better ESOV (excess share of voice).

• SOV matters and its importance increased over time due to the advertising market having become more cluttered; SOV > SOM – brands tend to grow; SOV< SOM – brands tend to shrink.

• Measure and evaluate long and short-term results for all marketing activities: Short-term e.g. short-term sales, on & offline response, conversion.Long-term e.g. Business performance, price elasticity, brand equity, creativity & fame.

Brand building work is strategic, but only if it delivers business results just like performance marketing which must also deliver brand equity to deliver brand health and penetration growth.