The Light at the End of a Mith

The media case of the moment is Ferrari Luce and, as branding experts, we cannot avoid a reference.

Regardless of whether the company’s choices are well-founded or not, what makes us think is the intensity with which the public has felt entitled to judge. And the question that naturally comes to my mind is: why?

Because, in real life, it drives on the same roads I drive on with my 2013 Smart. The same traffic lights, the same speed limits, and the same very concrete impossibility of truly using all the power it promises.

So what is the statement of Luce?

In its simplest form, no global brand, especially one so exposed, can afford today to completely ignore the environmental factor in front of a public whose expectations have changed over the last decades.

And so this transition was absolutely necessary. And it probably arrived this late precisely because such sharp judgments were inevitable. In this sense, Ferrari had to make a choice.

And, looking at it from a branding perspective, the decision not to simply build a “normal Ferrari, but electric” has a very strong coherence. It would probably have been the easiest mistake to make: an electric almost-Ferrari. Nostalgia with a battery.

Because when a product is so deeply felt, so codified, so full of collective memory, changing it only on the surface can be more dangerous than openly breaking with it.

Luce seems to be born from exactly this intuition: if it has to be an electric Ferrari, then it has to be something else.

So, from a certain point of view, everything makes sense. Everything is strategically defensible.

And yet something went wrong.

Even before looking at the product, the public reacted to a symbolic fracture:

Let's make a step back, Ferrari truly became a myth within the social language of the 1950s. And those years carried values that were completely different from ours.

They were the years of reconstruction, of trust in industry, of racing as progress, of masculinity, of speed as conquest. Within that world, Ferrari perfectly embodied the desire of its time.

Today, instead, the public speaks of sustainability, but also lives inside a brutal attention economy. It asks for responsibility, but distrusts declarations that sound too perfect. It seeks authenticity, but turns everything into a meme. It desires luxury, but judges ostentation. It asks for the future, but still looks for familiar signs in order to feel safe.

This is the contemporary contradiction. And it is a fundamental point for anyone working in branding: there is a huge difference between a required value and a distinctive value.

A required value allows you to remain within your time, while a distinctive value allows you to remain within people’s memory.

If Ferrari desire has always been carnal, mechanical, sonorous, almost irrational, Luce instead speaks a more intellectual language: technology, silence, efficiency, control.

And the point is not to decide whether this is right or wrong, but to understand whether the public had the emotional tools to recognize it as Ferrari. To give an example from outside the industry, it’s like when, all of a sudden, the voice actor dubbing your favorite actor changes.

If we shift to the product point of view, when a brand owns such a powerful myth, every evolution has to solve an extremely difficult paradox: it has to change enough to feel like the future, but remain recognizable enough to still feel like itself.

If it changes too little, it becomes nostalgia. If it changes too much, it becomes estrangement.

Luce seems to have placed itself exactly in this zone of tension. It has changed a lot: proportions, function, visual language, potential audience and reference imaginary. And in itself, each choice, taken individually, may have its own logic; the combination is what exploded.

And when the public can no longer find its points of reference, it does what the public always does today: it criticizes and creates memes.

And perhaps this is where Luce becomes an extraordinary branding case, because it reminds us that a brand can do everything correctly and still be misunderstood.

The Luce itself is not the problem, but reveals the struggle every myth faces when it has to adapt to a new era.

And this struggle does not concern Ferrari alone. It concerns every brand that has built its value on a powerful imagination and now finds itself facing a question far more complex than simple product innovation.

How do you stay true to yourself when the world that made you desirable no longer exists in the same way?