Musk’s Tesla needs some urgent brand repairs
Agencies have been arguing until they’re blue in the face that brand building is the key to sustained corporate growth. And, seemingly, the message is failing to hit home to an ever greater extent in today’s tech and performance-dominated wilderness.
Sometimes, though, the importance of liked and trusted brands imposes itself on even the most arrogant of tech bro’s: cue Elon Musk.
Shares in Tesla actually rose 5% this morning as it reported a 20% drop in car sales for the first three months of the year while profits fell more than 70%. Why? Because the CEO, in effect Musk, announced that he was returning to his creation after months of rampaging around in the US election campaign and taking a chainsaw to US government employees as part of his DOGE programme.
Tesla is still valued at a heady $745.67bn (after briefly hitting more than $1 trillion) and Musk owns 12.8%. But its P/E ratio (price to earnings) is a scarcely believable 116.75. Meaning that, potentially, it has a long, long way to fall as reality sets in.
Musk’s antics, at X (formerly Twitter) have played a big part with European consumers in particular turning away from a brand which, whatever its product excellence, has become synonymous with the right-wing rantings of its boss. But tech bro’s have also succeeded because the market thinks they’re never wrong. Didn’t it dawn on Musk that the only boss he listens to – Donald Trump – with his MAGA policy of tariffs against everything he deems un-American – would be a disaster for a company that depends on a global supply chain and has a huge business in China?
It’s all very well Musk now saying he’s against tariffs but that horse has (for now) bolted.
As for the brand, it’s been damaged, maybe irreparably. Tesla has triumphed because it doesn’t just make good electric cars, it was much cooler than the boring efforts from VW and some American makers. Now it has fast-charging, cheaper Chinese models to deal with – outside the US – too.
Musk was the Tesla brand to a large degree, a rule-breaker with a way of anticipating the future. Now Tesla urgently needs some brand work, with or without Musk. Might it even try advertising (which it has so far studiously and profitably ignored?)
Fellow tech bro Jeff Bezos has, so far, mostly avoided politics, apart from creeping to Trump. Amazon is now the world’s biggest advertiser by some distance. That would be another climb-down for Elon but, as ever with these things, it’s probably best to follow the money.
