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!

While the COVID-19 pandemic feels like a ghost from the past and old news, it’s still impacting consumer behaviour today. Five years later, it continues to shape how people live, shop, and make decisions. Here are five key changes in consumer behaviour and what brands need to do to stay relevant.

1. People Are Spending More Time Alone – And Online

With less commuting and more flexible work arrangements, consumers have reclaimed time. Much of this reclaimed time is spent independently—on hobbies, fitness, online shopping, and scrolling through social media. Interestingly, while people have more time, the amount of time they spend with others hasn’t increased. This means the share of time spent alone has grown.

2. Digital Channels Win Users – But Not Their Trust

Consumers are spending more time on digital platforms, but trust hasn’t followed. Social media is one of the least trusted sources for buying decisions, even though it’s where people connect with friends and family—who remain the most trusted sources.

The paradox: digital channels are powerful but under scrutiny. For brands, this means delivering authentic, personalised messages across platforms and tapping into trusted sources like product reviews, influencers, and social proof to build credibility.

3. Gen Z Grows Up – And Spends Differently

Gen Z is coming of age. They are poised to become the largest and wealthiest generation, but their path to adulthood is distinct. Unlike previous generations, they prioritise financial security and career success. Traditional milestones like marriage or homeownership matter less.

Despite this pragmatism, they’re also the most willing to splurge—especially on fashion and beauty. For brands, the challenge is to offer experiences and products that Gen Z deems “splurgeworthy”.

4. Local Beats Global

Consumers are leaning toward buying from local brands and supporting domestic businesses. Global companies now face higher expectations when operating outside their home markets.

Winning in 2025 and beyond will require multinationals to localise more deeply—tailoring products, sourcing locally where possible, and making portfolio choices that reflect local consumer needs.

5. Consumers Are Redefining Value

Rising prices remain the number-one concern. Consumers are adapting by trading down—but not always in predictable ways. They’re willing to shift across categories, rethinking what’s essential and what’s worth paying more for.

Simple assumptions about category loyalty or price sensitivity no longer hold.

What does it mean?

• Get closer to the consumer: Sentiment and spending patterns are increasingly disconnected. Brands must dive deeper to truly understand what drives decisions today.

• Invest in data-led pricing and promotion strategies. Consumers are savvier, more price-conscious, and are making more complex trade-offs.

• Tailor your brand portfolio for growth. Rethink your go-to-market models, including e-commerce strategies and market prioritisation.

Would you like to shapen your growth strategy with a consumer-first approach? Let’s connect!

Source: McKinsey 2025 Consumer Trend Report

Shift Mindsets: Embrace a learning mindset. This means shifting from a failure to a learning perspective is crucial for success. Learn from mistakes, innovate, and pivot.

Promote Curiosity: Your team needs you to create environments where experimentation is encouraged early on. This allows teams to test scenarios and discover innovative solutions without the pressure of immediate consequences.

Build Psychological Safety: A psychologically safe environment fosters trust and curiosity, key elements in driving innovation. For example capability centers offer risk-free environments where teams can fail fast and learn quickly.

Invest in Capabilities: Help your team by building critical skills in problem-solving, product design, and digital technologies to raise the bar as a team and stay competitive.

Overcome Resistance: Executives must identify and empower the right team members who are willing to drive the move forward, ensuring alignment across the organization.

Celebrate success & failure: Recognizing and celebrating small wins can boost motivation and drive continuous improvement. Celebrating failures will encourage the team to experiment.

By adopting these strategies, organizations can turn the fear of failure into a powerful catalyst for innovation and long-term success.

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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

In today’s saturated markets, too many companies are trapped battling competitors for a bigger slice of the same pie, often through marginal innovation, price, or incremental marketing tweaks.

But what if the biggest opportunity lies not in fighting for space—but in creating new demand altogether?

This is how brand builders and marketers can make a difference for the business: by acting as growth drivers. It’s not enough to ask, “How do we position ourselves better than our competitors?” The better question is:

“What truly matters to our consumer that no one else is offering?”

Why Brand-Building Is Your Best Tool

Strong brands don’t just compete—they lead. They shape new categories, solve unarticulated needs, and tell compelling stories that shift consumer expectations.

Brand-building enables in three critical ways:

1. Consumer Insight: By deeply understanding your audience’s unmet needs, frustrations, and aspirations, you can uncover spaces that others haven’t yet claimed.

2. Emotional Connection: Emotional differentiation matters as much as functional superiority. Great brands don’t just offer better products—they promise better futures.

3. Strategic Narrative: Brand positioning and communication shape how a new offer is understood, increasing adoption and reducing the friction of change.

The Role of Marketing: Making New Value Visible

Creating new value is only half the equation. Marketing makes it visible. The most successful companies—think Waterdrops or Airbnb,—didn’t just launch innovative products. They marketed them differently.

Effective marketing accelerates the adoption of category-creating ideas. It reduces the perceived risk of the new and transforms the unfamiliar into the desirable.

AI is collapsing the timeline from insight to execution.

Where traditional market research and strategy development could take months, AI enables rapid, iterative exploration of:

• Consumer sentiment and unmet needs (via real-time data analysis)

• Emerging trends and whitespace opportunities (via predictive analytics)

• Messaging and creative effectiveness (via content generation and testing tools)

This doesn’t replace the need for brand strategy. It supercharges it.

AI helps marketers simulate scenarios, A/B test at scale, and uncover early signals that point toward new demand spaces.

Final Thought: Growth Requires Bold Choices

The most successful businesses I work with aren’t just optimising—they’re reimagining. They ask not just how to gain market share, but how to reshape the market. They think of their brand and customer experience as a competitive advantage.

Whether you’re a founder, marketer, or business leader: If your market feels crowded, commoditised, or stuck—it might be time to stop fighting over the old pie and start baking a new one.

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

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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?

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The Strategic Service Framework

Successful turnarounds require thoughtful choices rather than blind cost-cutting. Consider this three-step approach:

1. Identify customer priorities through research and data analysis.

2. Make strategic choice by determining where to excel and where to deliberately cut effort.

3. Reallocate resources to strengthen differentiation and operational efficiency

Real-World Application

In one business transformation I led, the company initially aimed to match premium brands across all touchpoints—an unsustainable goal given their resources. Through customer research, we discovered:

• Product design was non-negotiable for customers

• Merchandising and in-store materials could be simplified without affecting satisfaction

• Customer service costs could be reduced by using automated emails and an online help centre vs. call centre agents

By seeking to reduce merchandising costs, the team identified a new solution that didn’t compromise the perceived premium. For customer service, the self-help and automated emails were even preferred vs. speaking to an agent.

If your organisation is struggling, start by asking these key questions:

• Where should we outperform? (What do customers genuinely value?)

• Where can we strategically underperform? (What activities aren’t driving growth?)

• How do we align our operations, people, and brand around these priorities?

The Uncommon Difference

The principles of “Uncommon Service” extend beyond customer experience—they provide a blueprint for sustainable growth, enhanced profitability, and strengthened brand equity.

Making these deliberate trade-offs is what ultimately separates businesses that struggle from those that thrive in challenging environments.

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