Tesla bubbles on the hillside. No they're not made out of ticky tacky. But when together at a charging station, well they all look just the same.
There are red ones and blue ones. And green ones and yellow ones. But when they need their kilowattage, well they all look just the same.
Distinctiveness is a key principle in positioning – layering the idea of uniqueness onto the more well-known principle of differentiation. Focusing on creating and maintaining consistent unique codes through brand identity elements like logo, patterns, colours, fonts, celebrity links, etc. helps good modern brands with salience – the principle of consistently getting into consumer brains with the magical combination of signals and codes that helps them think “you recognize me, you know who I am, you remember me, and you like me.”
Product Distinctiveness as part of Marketing Distinctiveness
Tesla’s legendary “$0-marketing-budget” approach relies heavily on Elon Musk’s Tony-Stark-Style brand and social media presence, the fact they’re the out-of-nowhere company that made EVs mainstream, and also on the instantly recognizable bubble-car exterior of all its production models (let’s talk about the literally ultra-sharp Cybertruck later).
But when the most consistently distinctive-looking product in a category is also the most popular, a weird thing happens. They become boring-looking and samey when they congregate. Uniqueness becomes a uniform. This isn’t necessarily a problem in markets that are counterintuitively homogeneous like the USA or Canada. In North America Tesla controls almost 71% of the BEV market, according to Statista’s Mobility Market Outlook.
In both Europe and Asia, Tesla only controls around 13% of the BEV market according to the same study. This is important because proportionally, Europe has a far better-developed BEV market than North America. According to ACEA, 10% of new European cars in the year to Q2 2022 were electric, while according to Bloomberg, only 4% of cars manufactured in the USA in the same period were electric. Car and Driver reports that only 4.6% of US new car registrations in that period were electric.
Think about the flow of new cars sold like a stream, and the accumulation of cars seen on the roads and at fuelling / charging stations like a lake. In North America, the lake is full of early adopters' bubbly Tesla fish, to the point where many people think there can be no other types of fish. In Europe, there's a thriving, more diverse EV ecosystem with German, French and South Korean EVs just as likely at a public charging station as a Tesla.
People in Europe are opting for a wider variety of EV options, perhaps partially due to the fact that it’s kind of boring to have the same-looking EV as everyone else, no matter how good that EV happens to be. EV buyers in North America don’t mind the sameness at this stage.
The Scott Galloway Hypothesis - Back the winning brand or you won't procreate (as much or as well).
Scott Galloway talks about the dominance of iPhone as the phone of choice for well-off Americans in these terms:
“Your No. 1 instinct is survival and, once that box is checked and you think, ‘I’m going to make it through the day,’ your No. 2 instinct is procreation. The No. 1 signal of wealth, the No. 1 signal of power, the No. 1 signal of your likelihood of a random sexual encounter in a greater selection set among potential mates is the iPhone.”
“This is the new signaling device…. “An iPhone is saying to the opposite sex, or a potential mate, ‘I have good genes. You should mate with me.’”
Tesla is currently the North American good-gene-signalling EV of choice. Once the market develops further, the ubiquity of the bubble cars might start to wear thin for more people. Maybe Tesla will move to a completely Cybertruck-style design language for mainstream models to get a new sense of product distinctiveness, but the strength and breadth of EV offerings (and intensity of marketing efforts) from other American brands and performance European and Korean brands means the 70.6% North American EV penetration that Tesla currently enjoys is not sustainable.
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