Bugatti
Driving incomparable success through hyper luxury solutions
Evolving an incomparable automotive brand into a hyper-luxury icon.
Our world today is characterized by uncertainty and constant change. To be successful in such an environment, for brands it is necessary to continuously evolve. This applies even to the world’s most iconic brands such as the “Hyper-Luxury” automotive brand BUGATTI.
But how can such a well-known and strong brand continue to evolve? How can the brand be elevated to a new level without diluting its core? And how can the business behind the brand open up new growth opportunities while preserving the brand’s legacy?
As part of the answer to these questions, BUGATTI has recently expanded its product portfolio and invested further in technological innovation. To ensure that the BUGATTI brand continues to fit this evolution, the time was ripe to adapt the brand strategy and experiences to this new direction and ambition.
The goal of BUGATTI is clear: to move out of the category of “Hyper-Cars” and into more comprehensive, holistic luxury experiences to explore new revenue sources, and enable consistent and coherent brand experiences across all established and newly created touchpoints.
From strategy to brand feel to design: how to create incomparable luxury brand experiences.
Ettore Bugatti once summed up the essence of the brand as, “If comparable, it is no longer BUGATTI.” But how can one reposition a brand whose claim is to be incomparable?
The answer lies in a clearly defined strategic foundation and a precisely formulated Brand Feel, the foundation for the visual brand identity.
Brand experiences are typically BUGATTI when they evoke feelings of exclusivity, elegance, and technological brilliance. When they make people gasp in amazement, hold their breath, and transport them for a brief moment into an avant-garde world.
The biggest challenge was consistently bringing this Brand Feel to life in the visual translation across all touchpoints.
“Technologically, we are on the right path to advance the brand: with bold steps that give us an advantage. With the new CI/CD, we will do justice to the brand’s technological incomparability with iconic touchpoints and activations,” says Hendrik Malinowski, Managing Director Sales and Marketing at Bugatti Automobiles.
Creating a holistic luxury brand beyond automotive.
In close collaboration with the client, a global team of Interbrand’s strategists and designers with diverse backgrounds worked on the development and implementation of brand strategy and visual identity. The aim of this multi-disciplinary team was to ensure that the new direction and identity of BUGATTI can consistently be anchored and established in every fiber of the company.
The created visual identity extends from the new color palette, the introduction of the new luminous Bugatti Blue, which refers to the origins in French motorsport, a bespoke typeface inspired by elements of BUGATTI’s heritage and engineering spirit, new concepts for photography, illustration and motion, using chiaroscuro and abstraction, the optimized wordmark, the simplified EB monogram, all the way to a new and central role for the iconic “Macaron” – the jewel that adorns the vehicles.
All these elements find their application on both digital and physical touchpoints and shape not only the website, newsroom, and social media but also events, showrooms, and the BUGATTI headquarters in Molsheim.
Jens Grefen, Senior Executive Director Creation, Interbrand in CEE, sums up: “The new CD/CI reflects BUGATTI’s ambition to evolve from a Hyper-Luxury automotive brand to a holistic, avant-garde French luxury brand. This brand’s claim, which is clearly positioned in a larger arena ‘beyond automotive,’ is also reflected in the design translation, which emphasizes the stunning technology and beauty that makes every BUGATTI product incomparable through contrasts, play with scaling, aestheticization of forms, exaggeration of details, and the use of light.”
