How strong is the Tesla brand and what can we learn from it?
What can we learn about the Tesla brand from talking to the people waiting in line on launch day of the #TeslaModel3
Like other folks in Palo Alto this morning, while driving by the Tesla store, I was amazed by the line of people outside waiting to order the model 3.
Perhaps as Tim Stevens noted, it felt like this is unprecedented for a car. This is not a consumer product being launched here. This is not a gadget you replace every couple of years. Even more so, if you ask Google what is the length of car ownership, it would tell you based on a Kelley Blue Book report, that the average length of U.S. vehicle ownership hit an all-time high, and is at 71.4 month. This is something people buy for 6 years…
If I had to breakdown what actually fascinated me was the thought that while no one really knows anything about the product, and while this is not a simple purchase to make and isn’t even close to an “impulse buy” pricing at $35,000 — people still stood in line all night, to be bale to be the first to buy it…
To me this was intriguing.
I, like many others, love the Tesla brand. They’ve built an amazing product and an incredible brand. But I wanted to see how strong that brand is, or in other words — what can entrepreneurs learn about brand building from this? How important is it to have a strong brand? and what can you achieve when you have satisfied customers and brand loyalty?
So I did what every entrepreneur would do when he wants to learn from the greats: I postponed my first meeting and ran over to conduct a survey and talk to the crowd.
I thought I knew the answers to those questions being “of course” and “very”, but what I learnt from the lovely people standing in line amazed me.
I had to keep the survey short. I didn’t want to annoy people, and wanted to try to survey as many as I can in the 30 min that I had.
I managed to survey 23 different people who were interested in buying a car. (not scientific, but that’s the time I had :))
Obviously I started from the top of the line, from the ones who were there all night…
The first question I asked was the main question that bothered me- “why are you standing in line?” — for what purpose.
As you can see, 43% were there “to be first”. To be fair, some of the people who noted that, had a reason behind being first, which is not wanting to miss out on the $7.5k federal tax credit offered (“the federal credit under Internal Revenue Code Section 30D (IRC 30D) begins to decrease once a manufacturer reaches 200,000 qualifying EV sales in the US”). However, the same amount of people, 43%, stood their all night long because of their love to the product.
What was interesting about this is, that when I further asked what about the product, I rarely heard the word “electric” or “environment”. It was the overall product, the overall experience Tesla offers. This is a knockout to all other electric brands. If you’d ask owners of other electric cars for the reasons why they bought an electric vehicle, they would most probably mention the environment, or the fact that’s it’s electric, not the brand they chose. But not here, not with Tesla. People wanted to buy a Tesla because of what Tesla is and what Tesla managed to convey over to us —
It’s the ultimate car.
The second question I believe teaches us two amazing things. The first one being the time to purchase. Almost at the same percentage, were people whom have been thinking of buying this car for a while and the people thinking of buying the car since announcement in February. Even though being a product with a $35k price tag, Tesla manages to convince its loyal fans (soon to be customers) to make a purchase within a relatively short time. A decision that took almost the same amount of people over half a year to make.
Having said that, the other interesting point coming out of this question is the fact that everyone there thought about this purchase for a while. This isn’t an impulsive act. People weren’t there because they saw on social media that people are standing in line to buy a Tesla. They were there because they calculated it and planned it.
The 3rd question had a surprise in it too. Almost 10% of the people standing in line knew nothing about Tesla. They’ve never looked into buying one in the past, don’t have a friend who owns one and didn’t even read about the new Tesla and its rumors. Nothing. Just the brand. This is $35k we’re talking about…
The last question is the one that actually blew me away. This is the one that undoubtably shows how strong the Tesla brand is, and what you can achieve when you have such a strong brand.
35% of the people said that they have enough confidence in Tesla that they will want to buy a Tesla product for $35k. Just the basics of what the Tesla brand represents, just based on the standard Tesla has set for itself, people have decided to part ways of $35,000, without knowing what they’re actually getting…
This is amazing on all levels, but when you come to think of it, the other 65% show us something greater than that. The ones that aren’t “buying blindly”, are willing to put down $1,000 as a deposit to meet with Tesla and learn about the car. Without knowing anything about what they are going to buy, they will still pay $1,000. Meaning, every single one in this line is willing to pay at least $1,000 for a product they haven’t seen. ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS… I’ll let you take a moment and think about this for a second…
This is unbelievable, for a brand to reach such a level of trust and loyalty from their consumers and fans.
As I mentioned above, I love the Tesla brand and the product they make, but my appreciation to the work they’ve done with their branding, with their marketing, and above all the product itself that they created, has grown even more after speaking to their consumers in line and thinking about what I heard. It’s really phenomenal.
Going out there I didn’t think I’d learn so much about Tesla and their fans, but after speaking to the wonderful people there, I’m amazed by how sincere they were about the brand.
I still have more info to digest and hopefully I’ll have a followup post in the next few days.
One last thing, shoutout and thanks to my man @jgotz14 for helping me digest these results.
And just as an FYI if you’re interested:
