Horses for More Us

This week fast cars are electric and fast marketing is AI, but is more fast the goal?

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a petrolhead, loved car magazines, and still subscribe to a physical magazine today.

So, in this month’s Top Gear magazine, I saw an opinion piece with the subhead of “it’s time to look past performance metrics”. And after I checked I hadn't accidentally picked up Marketing Week, I realized this was about how horsepower and 0-60 times are becoming less of a mark of the best automobiles.

Ah yes, I said “petrolhead”, and of course the world of cars is changing with electrification, the same as my day job is changing with AI.

Until recently, horsepower was the measure of an exotic, desirable car. Extracting a lot of power from an internal combustion engine takes engineering skills, exotic materials, and expertise. Then, to make them at even a small scale for a profit and comply with safety regulations requires investment and a level of engineering in the manufacturing process.

Not everyone has access to that, and a litany of failed supercar brands attests to it.

Electrification has made performance accessible. A sensible(ish), practical car priced within reach of many people can now outperform some of the world's best supercars. And because they are less complex to manufacture, consumers have a relatively wide choice of very fast cars. This pretty much makes performance numbers as a measure of exotica irrelevant.

The analogy I’m making here is that AI gives us all horsepower, and I think there is something to learn from what high-end car brands are doing, if ultimate performance numbers are no longer the hallmark of quality and exclusivity.

The latest 911 is no longer the fastest of its type, but it is the most Porsche sports car. It doesn’t try to compete with a fast electric car; it focuses on being the best and latest incarnation of what it means to be a Porsche.

On the other hand, the electric Ferrari Luce, designed by the former Apple designer Jony Ive, caused a shock because it didn’t conform to whatever Ferrarists consider to be a Ferrari. Yes, the performance numbers are …err… performant, but who’s talking about that?

Fortunately for ardent Ferrarists, elsewhere Ferrari is creating the most Ferrari of Ferraris: the Ferrari 12Cilindri Manuale - and you don’t need to speak Italian to understand how that fits the brand.

And as I flick through the pages of the magazine, the focus for desirable automotive exotica seems to be on a different kind of performance: not horsepower, but the performance of the experience of interacting with the brand.

Yes… brand… I’ve indulged a bit in cars, so I’m getting to the lesson for marketers…

AI gives us all the horsepower - the horsepower close to that of the big brands.

I don’t know what you think is the best advert of all time; maybe it’s the Apple 1984 ad or how Guinness made a virtue of waiting with Surfer (the one with the horses) - we now have the marketing horsepower to convert our human creative brand ideas into this level of production with generative AI.

Then, of course, you can robot the shit out of the execution and have it delivered to every email box on the planet.

Execution at scale is not the differentiator. It is having an original idea, like how a galloping horse, and a surfer would encourage people to embrace your product flaw (the slow pour), then make that happen without a budget you have to pour into the Mad Men.

And not just a one-off, but how you consistently deliver it so it becomes your brand's experience.

More marketing horsepower is a diminishing differentiator. Standing out is what we do with that horsepower: create the most us thing of us, or slop our way into being generic at scale.

A beautiful 750 horsepower desirable thing that might seem down on the vanity power metric, or a thousand horsepower flying sports utility fridge that nobody gives a shit about?