This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

Tesla broke the other cars first
When the Tesla Model S was launched, its primary function was to tell a
story that, for a lot of luxury car neophiliacs, would break their current car.
Break it in the sense that it wasn’t fun to own anymore.
Wasn’t worth bragging about.
Didn’t increase their status as a smart, wealthy person, who was clearly
smarter and wealthier than everyone else.
This luxury car owner went to sleep the night before, delighted that the
car in the garage was shiny, new, and state of the art. That it was safe,
efficient, and worthy.
And then he or she woke up to discover that the story was no longer true.
Tesla understood that no one who bought one of the first fifty thousand
Teslas actually needed a car. They all had perfectly fine cars.
So Elon Musk created a car that changed the story that a specific group
told themselves, a story that undid their status as early adopters and as tech
geeks and as environmentalists and as those that supported audacity.
All at once.
The existing car companies have always had a hard time turning concept
cars into real ones. They launch concept cars at auto shows to normalize
them, to socialize the innovations, to make it more likely that the real car,
years down the road, won’t bomb.
They couldn’t launch the Tesla. Not because they didn’t know how (they
did) and not because they didn’t have the resources (they did). No, Ford and
GM and Toyota didn’t launch the Tesla because car companies like us don’t
take risks like this. And their customers felt the same way.

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Making a car that could have the impact the Tesla did on the story of
luxury cars wasn’t easy. Musk chose to go to difficult extremes in
positioning the car on behalf of his fans: it’s the fastest, the safest, and the
most efficient car of its size, ever. All three.
This audacity is available to more and more organizations as technology
shifts from “Could it be done?” to “Do we have the guts?”