Is Innovation Designed to Get Mocked?

I’m sure you would have heard the furore last week as Ferrari unveiled the Luce.

Unless, of course…you’ve been living under a rock. Or a Ferrari for that matter.

So, Ferrari announced their first electric car. £550,000. Quad motor. Zero to 100 in 2.5 seconds. Designed by Jony Ive's studio LoveFrom. Driven into Rome under a Santiago Calatrava sculpture with Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc in the launch video.

I wrote a Linkedin post defending it, and my co-founder even mocked me for doing so.

This was super divisive stuff.

The internet's finest marketeers got straight to work.

"Apple car that nobody wanted." "Looks like a Nissan Leaf." "Comes with a tote bag." (Still my favourite.)

The share price dropped 8% the next day. About £3 billion. Gone. The Italian Deputy Prime Minister publicly wondered what Enzo Ferrari would have made of it. The former Ferrari CEO Luca di Montezemolo said they should strip the prancing horse off it entirely. Somewhere a social media manager at Toblerone tweeted "we'll always keep the angles" and won the internet.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Every Luce that Ferrari try to sell, will sell. Ferrari makes 14,000 cars a year and has a waiting list longer, for many of their models, than most of their competitors combined. The first allocation will be gone by spring 2027. Analysts at RBC already called the share drop noise. The buyers don't read memes. They write deposits.

Which leaves the question. Who exactly was so upset?

A Pattern, Not a One-Off

Now, how could we forget just 18 months ago when Jaguar did the same dance.

They came equipped with a new logo. New typeface. A campaign full of androgynous models in dystopian pink deserts that, famously, did not feature a single car. Musk tweeted "Do you sell cars?" to 200 million people. The video hit 160 million views on X for all the wrong reasons.

Then it got worse. Jaguar wound down production of their existing ICE models before the new EVs were ready, so dealers stood in empty showrooms for months. UK sales fell 27%. Global sales for the year landed at around 26,000 cars. The chief design officer Gerry McGovern was reportedly escorted out of the building twelve months later.

Tropicana did it in 2009 and lost $33 million in sales in two months. Bud Light did it in 2023 and AB InBev lost roughly $30 billion in market value over a single can.

Even further into the past, AirBnB fell foul of what many described as a disastrous rebrand in 2014. In what must have been one of the earliest examples of a viral rebrand takedown, customers compared the new logo to sexual organs, creatively added a dog doing his business into the logomark and widely criticised it for being a “bad” logo. If beauty is in the eye of the shareholder, it was a great logo, their market cap is 700% higher today than it was at the time of the rebrand.

The pattern is so consistent at this point you could set your watch by it. A brand announces a change. The internet sets fire to it. And the loudest voices in the conversation are almost always the people who were never going to buy the product in the first place.

Why Non-Customers Get So Angry

Some researchers at the University of British Columbia ran five studies on this after the social issue-led Nike/Kaepernick campaign in 2018. Outraged people burned their Air Maxes on camera. But… sales went up $6 billion. The buyers? Mostly not pre-existing Nike customers. They were young people who saw the outrage, felt their own values under attack, and bought a pair of trainers as a symbolic vote.

The same thing works in reverse. When Ferrari changes its design language, the people losing their minds aren't Ferrari owners. Ferrari owners are on a three-year waiting list. The outrage comes from somewhere else entirely.

It comes from the people for whom Ferrari is a symbol, rather than a product they own. The dream of one day owning one. The aesthetic. The badge as a vibe. The poster on the bedroom wall in 1997.

When you change the car, you don't just change the car. You redecorate the imagined future of every person who ever planned to one day, maybe, buy one. And in an attention economy that runs on identity, having your fantasy renovated by Jony Ive feels personal.

Wanting what you can't have was always the brand. The aspiration is the product. And the aspiration belongs to a much, much larger group than the buyers, most of whom will never spend the money but have a strong opinion about the dream.

So How Do You Actually Announce Innovation?

A few patterns from the various autopsies.

One. Don't launch the brand transformation before the product exists. This was Jaguar's most expensive mistake. They announced a total position shift, killed their existing strap line (one of my favourite ever - Grace, Pace, Space), and then asked the market to wait a year for a car. The conversation had nothing to grip onto so it gripped onto the only thing on offer: the ad. Ferrari, for all the noise, didn't do this. They built the actual car. They drove it into Rome. People are arguing about a product

Two. Don't pretend the old world is over. Ferrari still makes ICE cars. The Amalfi (recently launched). The 296. The 12 Cilindri. The Purosangue. The Luce sits alongside them, not in place of them. Jaguar said the petrol cars were done. That was a big scary claim.

Three. Expect the meme cycle and stage it like a season finale. Stage 1 outrage isn't a failure of comms. It's a launch metric. Ferrari knew exactly what they were doing. They held a gala in Rome. Security blocked phone cameras. They engineered the controlled drop. The mistake isn't getting mocked. The mistake is panicking when you get mocked. The Nike/Kaepernick outrage earned Nike a reported $43 million in media value in the weeks following the launch.

Four. Read who is actually angry, not just how loud they are. Most brand teams measure sentiment volume. Almost none measure whose sentiment. The Ferrari order book will tell you everything the X feed won't. If your buyers are buying, the noise is just noise. If your buyers are leaving, the noise is a signal. Don't mix them up. Bud Light did. Jaguar did. The cost of confusing the two is, potentially, the entire company.

Five. Pick a lane and stand in it. The middle of the road is where brands go to die. Jaguar got mocked but they were trying to reposition a brand whose old customer base was literally aging out. That part wasn't wrong. The execution was.

What does this mean for marketers?

If you are launching anything genuinely new in 2026, your launch will be mocked by some. That is no longer a question. It is a pre-condition of the work landing at all.

I don’t think the job is to avoid the mockery…you can’t. The job is to know in advance which mockery matters and which mockery is just the price of admission. Nine times out of ten, the LinkedIn carousels and the X memes are the price. Your actual customers, the people who write the cheques, place the orders, fill the waiting lists - are quieter, harder to find, and much more rarely the same people screaming on a screen.

The brave brands launch and hold. They watch the order book, not the timeline. They let stage 1 burn itself out and trust that stage 3 will bring the KPI’s that were in mind when they launched.

The scared brands launch, panic, and revert. They confuse noise volume for verdict. They mistake people who'd never buy them for people they need to win back.

And the worst brands? They never launch at all. They sit in committee for another quarter, sanding the edges off the idea, until what they ship is so inoffensive that nobody mocks it, nobody mentions it, and nobody buys it either.

Jaguar might still come good. Ferrari, in my view, almost certainly will.

The only question is whether your brand has the stomach for stage 1.

Because there is no stage 3 without it.

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