The Tesla brand: A look under the hood
When it comes to branding, there is more than meets the eye.
A brand is a complex system that creates meaning for a product and service and turns it into perceived value for its consumers. As a system, it needs to be consistent and coherent in order to be recognizable and trustworthy.
Once laid out, great brands are intuitive, straightforward, and compelling to newcomers and experienced consumers alike. But beyond this apparent simplicity lies an intricate structure.
Creating a strong brand takes more than the juxtaposition of good design and bold copy, vivid colors and original typefaces. Branding is an organized process of research, crafting, testing, and fine-tuning. As Michael Eisner, Disney CEO from 1984 to 2005 put it: “A brand is a living entity — and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures”. Great brands rely on great foundations and multiple interconnected layers of pillars, elements, and expressions.
Today’s marketing professionals are great at creating and disseminating content, series of snackable assets, and micro-moments to multiply touch points and add to the customer journey. But we believe the real value of a brand and most of its appeal has to be created at another level.
At Timelapse, we have a systemic approach to branding. It is a process we developed to craft or revamp brands. It allows us to visually map and connect all the dots and links between the value of a product or service and its customers. Ultimately, we can build brands that are better aligned and create and translate more value. They are more scalable (because they’re built on thoughtful, vetted and solid foundations) and can better functionally and emotionally connect with existing and new customers.
At its core, the Tesla brands pulls from the concepts of disruptive innovation, minimalist luxury, futurism, and performance. All the “dots” align in our minds to create the right image and foster a massive brand appeal.
Being a Tesla owner feels special because one knows what it means. In other words, the dots and links that make up the brand align perfectly.
On the contrary, we’ll see how misaligned dots and broken links can cause confusion or a loss of value in other brands. Visually mapping out a brand allows us to analyze weak links, and strategically prioritize the work.
We can describe a brand as an invisible “constellation” of connected dots that make up the fabric of a brand. Without it, brands would be empty shells, disconnected from their consumers. Through it, brands better connect with their consumers and create value and meaning.
Every creative choice and brand development rest on it. It’s key for a brand to resonate with an audience, make sense, and beat competing brands.
Let’s get visual. Structurally, here is one way to look at a brand. More than a flat and straightforward two-dimensional plane, a brand is composed of a scaffold of three layers: Pillars, Qualities, and Expressions.
Brand Expressions
Let’s start at the upper level.
A brand is “expressed” to the world through what we call the Brand Expression. This is the most obvious and visible layer where we find social media channels, marketing content, websites, videos, packaging, and all the other digital and traditional channels.
The newest marketing technology and trends focus on multiplying brand “expressions” and automating their production or dissemination. More touch points, more channels, more attribution pathways, make the brand expression more powerful, personalized, and bring the whole experience closer to the customer. But the brand expression falls flat if it’s not connected and aligned with the lower levels of the brand.
When it’s well built, the brand connects these dots with the underlying concepts and elements that support them. For example, Tesla’s website is sleek, dynamic, innovative, yet simple and doesn’t require any learning curve, like the car. It is all about minimalism (it’s quite small), performance, and innovation. The dots are well connected with the lower level of the scaffold.
Of course, it speaks about the “future of driving”, connecting to the strong brand pillars that we’ll discuss later on.
Brand Qualities
The process of creating a brand is mostly conceptual work that happens at the lower levels. It is not meant to be “seen” by consumers. We call the next layer the Brand qualities.
This is the set of rules and guidelines that define the brand. They’re also interconnected dots and links that branch out and connect with the higher and lower levels of the brand.
Brand qualities form the elemental “playbook” that every brand, small of big, should rely on. Brand qualities can be categorized in creative elements, narrative elements, and behavioral elements.
Creative elements are mostly clustered around the brand visual identity, but also the auditory and sensitive identities. The auditory identity of a brand is often overlooked. For example, brand names that connect with the product from a sound perspective, tend to be more recognized and sought after. Think of Senseo, a coffee maker, and how it appeals to the smoothness of their coffee and the warm, enveloping feeling of drinking coffee.
Narrative elements are the tone of voice (how the brand sounds like) and the brand voice (what the brand is telling and how it is telling it). It is also often overlooked and a great way for newer brands to differentiate in ultra-competitive environments. Take the brand voice of Starbucks and its expression on social medial. It is all about building your own identity. It features creative, independent, successful individuals. Of course, this all connects back with the Starbucks drink you choose and you personalize. The tone is perfect for teenagers and young adults, the age range the brand is trying to appeal to the most. On the other hand, Peet’s hasn’t developed such a strong brand voice that differentiates and connects with its customers. It has been focusing on quality and ingredients. Not as powerful to compete on a commodified market.
Typically, you’ll find the creative, narrative, and behavioral principles wrapped up in a “brand book”. Designers, copywriters, marketers, social media managers, rely on the brand book as a single source of truth for the brand, a platform that everyone responsible for the brand agreed to follow (some will say “protect”) to stay “on brand” and work within the frame of its principles.
Going back to Tesla, this is what the dots look like at this level.
Red is the color of performance. Grey and silver express luxury, but in a minimalist and technologized manner. The logo that looks like a dashboard is about performance and speed as well.
This final and lowest foundational level is typically the most underrated when creating a brand (or considering a rebranding). It is however key to define it to create a strong brand.
Brand Pillars
The Brand Pillars is the foundational layer of your brand and where the branding process should begin.
It is made up of the brand story, the inspiration, the value and the historical and cultural context of the brand.
The vision
Between what the brand came from and how it will change the world lies the context of the brand. For Tesla, the brand vision is to invent the future, then bridge the technological gap between now and then. Its vision is to dos so by exclusively producing game-changing innovations.
The context
Often overlooked, the political, economic, environmental or societal context is key to understand how a brand connects with its customers. Timing is part of this, and essential for a brand to thrive. Tesla is perfectly positioned in a context of growing individualism, environmental concerns, and an age of deep model and technological disruption, where the demand for game-changing innovations is more elastic.
The personality
Tesla refers back to the inventor as the inspiration behind the brand. The brand personality, in the case of Tesla, is also closely associated with Elon Musk’s personality.
The value
Functional: Tesla’s functional value is to deliver as innovative of a driving experience as possible, as close to the driver’s expectations as possible.
Emotional: Feeling ahead and part of the future is the emotional value that Tesla brings.
As an international strategy and creative Agency, we at Timelapse have our own unique and systemic approach to branding. This process allows us to build brands that are better aligned and create and translate more value.
Timelapse is a strategic creative agency with offices in San Francisco, Denver, and NYC. See our work at teamtimelapse.com
