JOHN DAVENPORT: Can the Tesla brand be saved after Musk did his worst to destroy it?

Building a brand around a personality carries risks. On several occasions I have suggested to clients that we use a specific personality to represent the brand, and inevitably someone in the room has said the exact same words: “What if they get caught drunk driving? That would be bad for the brand.”

Funnily, nobody has ever said: “What if they become sort-of-deputy-president-of-America and fire thousands of teachers and aid workers, while gutting environmental legislation? That would be bad for the brand.” 

But the new normal means this is perhaps the kind of outcome we should be debating, because that is exactly what has happened to the Tesla band.

Tesla was built around a single personality in a way few brands have been. One struggles to think of other examples. Coco Chanel perhaps? Although post-World War 2, she stayed prudently clear of politics. Steve Jobs? I’m not sure he was ever quite as central to the brand as Musk is/was to Tesla. 

And it worked. Musk was the vague billionaire tech genius who gave the perfect aura to Tesla. It wasn’t that long ago that he was getting cool walk-on roles in Iron Man as we fawned over his Tony Stark-ness, and the most controversial thing he did was give his children strange names better suited to lab-grown meat, injectable steroids or kitchen appliances.

Famously, Tesla virtually never made an ad or did any real advertising. It didn’t need to, because Musk was the brand. But then came the awkward Twitter-buying phase, followed by the recent phase that shall not mention its name. 

The whole deputy-emperor thing might have gone fine. Sadly for Tesla stockholders, this was not the case. There was a problem. The people Musk enraged with his department of government efficiency (Doge) antics weren’t just anyone, they were Americans from the coast and Europeans. They were electric car buyers. Effectively, Musk managed to use his genius to specifically enrage the exact people who were inclined to buy electric cars.

He had elegantly insulted his entire target market. This is the equivalent of the CEO of L’Oreal going door-to-door and personally insulting every woman on the planet, and then wondering why sales look bad. Had Musk been in the business of manufacturing V12 pickup trucks the fallout might have been tolerable. They may have even applauded his efforts and thrown a monster truck rally in his honour. But the composition of the Tesla customer base means this is not the case.

Which may explain the sudden Tesla pickup truck lawn sale in the front garden of the White House. Was this a sign that Tesla was realising it needed to find new customers because their boss had told all their existing ones to go #$#% themselves? 

Can Tesla bounce back from the turd bomb that has erupted at the heart of the business? It is hard to see how, purely because Musk’s brand of right-wing politics is exactly what European and US electric-car buying liberals hate. The only other major electric car market is in China, a tough nut to crack because it possesses a phenomenal domestic electric car industry.

And, is there another group of people the current US administration has gone to great lengths to offend? Yes there is … and it’s called China. 

Good job Elon. So while generally shorting the stock of a company that has already lost half its value is a bad idea, in this case it may not be. Because unless Musk can persuade Greta Thunberg or Kamala Harris to take over as CEO, the Tesla brand is in serious trouble.

From now on those wanting to be inducted into the marketing cock-up hall of fame are going to have to do better than produce a poorly thought-out venture into the LBGTQ space. Because the bar just got pushed far, far higher. 

• Davenport is chief creative officer for Vice Media & Virtue Advertising London & Dubai, a part-time psychology student and an occasional war correspondent.