Picture the near future, which is closer than it looks. You open an app and a car arrives with no driver and a non-useful steering wheel. The ride to the airport that costs $70 today will cost $20. Before long, you may not own a car at all. And with that, the brand of the car sent to pick you up will mean almost nothing. You did not buy the car. You summoned a service. So what, exactly, are you choosing?
That is the question the entire driverless industry needs to answer. How do you build a brand for something you can’t see?
INSIDER-OUT BRANDING
In the driverless economy, the brand becomes what’s inside the car as well as the user experience both in the app and in the ride. When the vehicle becomes a service you summon rather than a possession you own, the decision stops being Ford or Volkswagen and becomes something more intimate and important. Whose artificial intelligence is driving? Whose safety and crash-avoidance system is inside? Whose connectivity keeps me seamlessly online? Whose interior lets me work on the way to the meeting? The car turns into a platform, and the relevant brands are the systems riding inside it.
This insider-out branding is already happening. Waymo talks about the Waymo Driver. Tesla sells Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. Mobileye built an entire ingredient brand around the intelligence that lets a car see. Mercedes named its automated system Drive Pilot. Some of these names are strong and some are placeholders, but the pattern is unmistakable: The value and the trust are migrating to the named layers inside the vehicle.
This inside brand has played out before in other sectors. When the personal computer became a commodity box, the brand that captured the value was not the box. It was the chip. Intel Inside, and the Pentium name, turned an invisible component into what customers asked for by name. The lesson holds, and it is about to repeat at a far larger scale. As products dissolve into software, the branding for the intelligence inside the product captures the value formerly held by the hardware. A car is becoming software on wheels. The intelligence inside it needs to be named, and named brands are more likely to succeed in the market.
Trust makes this urgent. Until now, buying a car was a decision based on considerations like status, safety features, driving, and comfort. Getting into a driverless car is a decision about your life. You are handing a machine the wheel at 70 miles an hour, and you will want to know whose judgment you are trusting. That is what a great brand name can do. It compresses a mountain of reassurance into a single word you already believe. In an autonomous ride, an unbranded system is an untrusted system. The safety brand and the AI brand will be the product.
THE OPPORTUNITY
This is why the opportunity window is so large, but so brief. The brands that will define this category mostly do not exist yet. The incumbents are quiet, the naming is haphazard, and the companies building the technology are, understandably, thinking about sensors and software. They are not thinking about the words that will carry them into millions of lives. Whoever names these systems first, and names them well, will own the trust and therefore the choice, for a generation. This is a land grab, and the land is language.
The mistake is treating any of this as decoration, something to settle later with a logo and tagline. A name is the asset a company builds once and then inhabits for the life of the business, and the single thing a competitor cannot copy. Companies that understand that the brand has moved inside the car, and that naming the brand is a strategic act, will build the trusted names of the autonomous age.
So, who names the driverless car? The answer will be decided by whoever moves first. Those who succeed will see that when the driver disappeared, the brand did not. It simply climbed inside.
David Placek is the founder of Lexicon Branding.