How car brands are embracing diversity

Having talked on and off the record to senior insiders at various British luxury automotive brands over the past few years, there is some real change going on, both internally at the companies and in the sort of brands that are emerging to face customers. Which means their products are changing, too.

Gone are the days when brands could tell who their customers were: globalisation, emerging markets and disruptive products mean the average age of a high-net-worth individual has come right down (Rolls-Royce’s now touches 40 years old). With bolder, younger, more confident customers comes a new set of demographics – LGBTQ, the now-discredited BAME label, single dads, working mums – and they want to buy cars from brands that recognise them, appreciate them and reflect them. Empathy is the game changer for profitability here.

So if customers wants vegan interiors and bright-pink paint work, or if they don’t care what car they buy as long as it doesn’t contain chrome, or just want to buy from whoever sponsors Pride Week, or want a car whose wool they can trace back to a certain sheep in Wales to make sure it’s a happy sheep, then car companies had better be ready to respond.

And that goes for the people working for car brands: who wants to work for a car company that doesn’t allow flexible working, or has no D&I board, or isn’t signed up to the Automotive 30pc Club to ensure 30 per cent female representation at board level by 2030?

By concentrating on a diverse portfolio of staff, you get a wider reach of customers, because there’s more experience and creativity flowing through the design, engineering, R&D and marketing departments, building cars in new and exciting ways.

Car brands are responding swiftly: Lamborghini has several female advisory boards and a cool above-the-line campaign featuring a woman leaving work and getting her thrills behind the wheel on the way home. Aston Martin started down this path years ago, with the hideously named “Ladies Nights” at Newport Pagnell for prospective new female customers. It was the wrong execution (they offered manicures and facials in between drives which was just odd) but the sentiment was the right one and no one else was even trying. Renault has possibly been the most audacious to date, with a TV campaign for the new Clio featuring a lesbian couple which has garnered plaudits.

It’s all tentative steps by car brands in getting to know their customers in a way they’ve never bothered to before. And that’s why Bentley’s Unifying Spur is so significant: it shows a luxury brand proactively reaching out into new territories, and with a striking degree of humility. Admittedly it’s easier for luxury brands to forge strong new relationships with their clients, because their sales volumes are tiny compared with that of the mass manufacturers, and the time they spend with individuals, helping them personalise their cars, is far longer. They can be way more creative in their whole approach. But I hope there’s a trickle-down effect to the rest of the market, in the same way that technology advances in Formula 1 trickle down to road cars, so that the entire industry moves away from static cars on impersonal motor show stands in front of anonymous crowds, to OEMs thinking long and hard about how they can narrow the gap between themselves and the customer. What can they do in terms of communications, internal staff policies, and, crucially, how can they reimagine their cars, so that the general public is inspired, touched and enthused by them? Most people dread the car-buying process, which is crazy. It’s time the relationship was razed to the ground and we were all inspired, instead, by a collection of car brands that want to get to know us and design cars with us in mind. It doesn’t sound like too much to ask.