Cultural Insights for Electric Luxury Automotive
Overview
When Lexus launched the RZ, its first electric vehicle, the strategy team needed a way to position it in a market where it wasn’t the only electric option, or the only premium one. What set the RZ apart was a sense of aliveness the engineers had built into the drive. I did a semiotic analysis of aliveness that gave the team a cultural vocabulary, in words and images, to build three positioning territories.
The question
How do you position an electric vehicle that isn’t the first or the only one? What does it mean for a car to feel “alive,” and how do you communicate that to the US market in a way that is true to the vehicle and clearly Lexus’s own?
The approach
At the start of a launch, I partnered with strategy to build the cultural understanding they need before getting to the brief. For the RZ, I took aliveness, the quality the engineers had designed into the driving experience, and analyzed how the idea shows up across culture, in language, imagery and brands. I mapped what I found on a semiotic square and developed it in full, with examples from brands and culture.
Outcome
The analysis gave the team eight codes of aliveness, each with its own examples, imagery and language. They became the inspiration, verbally and visually, for the three positioning territories. They also gave the planners a shared starting point for ideating, first for Lexus’s consumer research and then for the creative brief.