Lucid Motors

Positioning a Pioneer in a Competitive Market

Situation

Ride sharing, electric vehicles and driverless cars are changing our relationship with automobiles before our very eyes. They are causing us to rethink how we get around, and the experiences we expect and desire while mobile.

The major car companies have begun to respond to these new trends, but their approaches have been traditional: take existing conventions and tweak them. While this may satisfy some, it doesn’t respond to the fundamental changes to the role of the automobile in our daily lives.

Lucid Motors, a new market entrant from Palo Alto, California, saw the need to go beyond tweaking conventional approaches, committing instead to reinventing the automotive experience from the ground up. In a radically different approach, the company has built upon the benefits of an electrified platform to reconfigure space, rethink energy and apply technology to deliver a more intuitive, personal and luxury approach to mobility. Recruiting broadly for visionary talent within and outside the auto industry, Lucid assembled a team with the ambition to defy all conventions, and completely redefine the automotive experience.

Strategy

In close partnership with the Tolleson creative agency, we accompanied Lucid through branding positioning and messaging exercises to ensure their message of reinvention and redefinition was clear, aspirational, and connected to the new experience they were designing. The idea of a new driving experience without traditional constraints needed to be as compelling and elegant as the car itself would be. The expression of this belief: “Those not bound by convention are free to define their own experience” references both Lucid the company and their audience – cultural creatives and other self-actualizers who seek out and value new levels of human experience. This expression, symbolized by a name that communicates clarity and effortlessness as it defies “big iron” automotive conventions, serves as a touchstone for strategic design decisions, and inspires everyone’s accountability to an ambitious vision.

Results

Lucid Motors announced its new vision, and its first fully designed model, to broad industry interest, establishing them as a leader to watch as we enter this new era of mobility.

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