Ferrari: Finding New Customers

How do you deal with the challenge of finding new customers and putting those 10 people in the seat of the car? What approaches do you have, for finding those people?

Let’s say, that having such a powerful product, when we launch a new model, I would say that between 30% and 50% of clients are repeaters. Normally, those who purchased the car in the past will purchase again and again and again. Sometimes, keeping them all and sometimes, simply selling the old one and buying a new one. The relative number of repeaters is very high. This protects us against big surprises.

Then, of course, especially launching and opening our brand to new segments, when we entered the GT segment, more than 10 years ago, like it used to be 50 or 60 years ago, in Ferrari. Ferrari produced GT since the beginning, but then became famous for sports car. With the launch of California that was the return of Ferrari to the GT market, of course, we enlarged the number of potential clients. There were a lot of new Ferrari clients. How do we get them? There are several marketing ways to collect prospective clients but, at the end of the day, the key issue is to have people sitting in the car and have a test drive. This is the real selling point. No matter how beautiful the car is, no matter the level of personalization and color, the real difference is always the driving. The driving experience is what makes a Ferrari completely unique.

I also, aesthetically, love the cars. Some more, some less. With competitors, you can also choose the colors. They have hundreds of colors and they also have personalization. There are not too many competitors in our segment but, at the end of the day, we have five, six, seven that we see as our competitors. They are all very good cars. But our car is unique in the driving experience. There was one of my previous CEO who said that, when you buy a German car, you buy, most probably, a perfect car. But it’s like buying a perfect refrigerator. It’s perfect, fantastic, but it’s cold. When you buy a Ferrari, maybe sometimes, we are not perfect. As I said before, maybe sometimes we have small problems or we have some very little issues, but you are buying a passion. You are buying something where you sit in the car and you feel the difference in the engine, in the soundtrack, in many things.

When we design and we build engines, we are not only thinking about power and rate of 1-100mph. They are the parameters, of course, and are used as the selling points. But for us, the soundtrack is absolutely important. One of the engineers once told me, the engine was perfect, but it didn’t have the right sound. So sorry, we don’t want it. They have to redesign the engine, because it didn’t have the right sound. The sound of the car is an integral part of the experience, when you drive. When you sit in the car and, overall, you have the driving experience, including the soundtrack, you fall in love with it. I think we have one of the highest conversion rates in the industry. You drive it, you want it.