AMG lost its story. Ferrari betrayed its myth

AMG was born in a garage in Affalterbach with the goal of making Mercedes cars more aggressive than Mercedes dared to make itself. Its story was the engine — the sound and violence of a hand-built V8 — a car created by people who believed it should intimidate before it even moved. For decades, that story did the selling. You didn’t need to explain an AMG. You heard one coming. When Mercedes elevated AMG to a standalone performance brand, the AMG GT series was meant to prove that AMG could be its own thing. Form is what separates a brand from a parts catalog, and the GT was supposed to give AMG a distinct perspective. The new electric Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupe reveals that the point of view is gone. Reviewers, without coordinating, reached for the same word: a fish. AMG removed the engine that carried its story, then piped artificial V8 sounds and fake gearshifts into the cabin to cover the silence. When a brand fakes the one thing that made it authentic, it no longer knows what it is selling. From desire to ridicule Ferrari has the opposite problem, which is somehow worse. While AMG lost a story it half-built, Ferrari betrayed a story it perfected. My first time driving a Ferrari, an 812 Superfast in Tokyo, the experience began long before the engine fired. The car had me the moment I saw it in Rosso Corso, the brand’s iconic racing red. After the drive, I was not the same person. Every line carried the respect of speed. Ferraris were born on the racetrack and never stopped expressing it. The prancing horse was aggression refined into beauty. The Luce, its first all-electric supercar, is powerful and fast. It is also austere, clinical, and emotionless. Ferrari handed the visual definition of the most emotionally charged brand in automotive history to designers whose philosophy is calm precision, the opposite of irrational desire. Whether Jony Ive and Marc Newson failed to understand the brand or were asked to redefine it is beside the point. The result is a car no one who loves Ferrari ever asked for. What both companies are doing now is the part that should alarm their boards. The most iconic Ferraris and AMGs produced an instant positive reaction in almost everyone who saw them. These new models inspire something else: memes and laughter. Comedy is the one emotion luxury brands cannot afford. Yet Ferrari posts the Luce on its own channels as nothing short of spectacular. The comments are running into the thousands, nearly all negative, with some telling Ferrari to apologize and scrap the car. Mercedes is getting similar reactions of disbelief and is treating its reception as noise that will pass. No brand in modern history has survived a public rejection of this scale by ignoring it. Denial and silence do not contain a crisis; they compound it. This is not a story about electric cars. The Porsche Taycan launched to an overwhelmingly positive reception, design included, and never drew this level of backlash because it looked and felt like a Porsche from the first photograph. The powertrain changed, but its story did not. Ferrari and Mercedes did the opposite. Why brand story drives value I have spent over 20 years studying why some luxury brands command nonlinear value while others, with comparable products, do not. The work spans quantitative studies, including in the U.S., China, Japan, Germany, and France. The findings were consistent: the brand story drives the value. The clearer it is, the more Added Luxury Value (ALV) is perceived. In luxury, narrative clarity is a superpower. Inconsistencies erode value perception. Story consistency turned Ferrari from a maker of fast cars into a myth, into arguably the most iconic brand in the world. An engine story transformed AMG from a tuning shop into a global performance brand. But AMG never fully defined what it stood for beyond the engine itself, and now that the engine is gone, the void is palpable. In my brand audits, I often find that boards are convinced their brand story is unified and understood internally. Then we go deep, and very few people can tell that story with the precision required to unleash its power. Everyone knows the heritage, the founding dates, the position in the category — I call it the category vector. But strip the category position away and ask for the single emotional point of view that sets the brand apart, and the answer fractures. Many CEOs have told me directly how difficult it is to articulate, and they are right. It is not the expertise of most advertising agencies, because their focus is executing a brand, not strategically defining it. It is also nearly impossible from the inside, because the inside-out view clouds the outside-in perspective that defines the brand from the client. That perspective is the only one that matters, and it is the one both brands ignored. Story as luxury’s most critical filter Ferrari’s and AMG’s troubles offer a deeper lesson for the industry. Any luxury brand is one bad decision away from the same position. When the market rejects what you have made, the first move is to listen, not to post that the launch was spectacular. For Ferrari, the stakes are highest. A brand valued almost entirely on emotional value cannot signal that its myth is negotiable and expect its valuation to hold. The deeper work must happen long before any product is approved. The brand must be defined around a single emotional point of view, expressed from how the client feels rather than how the company sees itself. Every decision should then be measured against it: the product, the design, the experience, the execution. A story defined with that level of precision becomes the most critical filter. That level of clarity would have caught the Luce in a sketch review. It would have stopped AMG’s fake V8 before it reached production. Ferrari and Mercedes have the resources and talent to recover. The most critical question is whether anyone in either building can still articulate, in one word, what the brand emotion is. Right now, the cars are answering for them, and the answer is not the one they want. This is an opinion piece by Daniel Langer, CEO of Équité, recognized as one of the “Global Top Five Luxury Key Opinion Leaders,” and advisor to some of the most iconic luxury brands in the world. He serves as an executive professor of luxury strategy and pricing at Pepperdine University in Malibu and as a professor of luxury at NYU, New York. Daniel has authored best-selling books on luxury management in English and Chinese, and is a respected global keynote speaker. Daniel conducts in-person masterclasses on various luxury topics across the world. As a luxury expert featured on Bloomberg TV, Forbes, The Economist, and others, Daniel holds an MBA and a Ph.D. in luxury management and has received education from Harvard Business School. Sign up for his online luxury masterclasses at the Jing Academy.

AMG lost its story. Ferrari betrayed its myth

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AMG lost its story. Ferrari betrayed its myth

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