You know your prestige brand is in trouble when your profits aren’t great. But you know you’re in really serious trouble when, for the last ten years, you’ve lost £45K on each and every car you’ve sold.
How has Aston Martin allowed itself to sink this low with such a fantastic brand? It’s the car of James Bond! They’re a brand with cars that have so much heritage, awareness and lust, but still they can’t turn a profit of any size, let alone a decent one.
I’d love to get my hands on their pricing research and see how and why they’re priced at such a loss-making point for so long. You can argue a short term loss is down to restructuring, branding or product development, but not for a decade. It’d be cheaper for them to just stop making cars altogether.
Arguably they make too many models of too many types of car, trying to cover all the bases with a hyper car, super car and SUV. Trying to cover all the bases of racing at the same time – Formula 1 and the Le Mans series with the Valkyrie hypercar – seems like a stretch too far for the gentleman’s car. GT (which they’re also in) seems to be the natural racing choice for Aston Martin, with cars based on exclusive road-legal sports cars.
Their cars should scream, or perhaps more politely and discretely make you aware, that they’re British. Harking back to the DB5 of Sean Connery in Goldfinger to the more modern DB10 of Daniel Craig (and a favourite of mine, the V8 Vantage of criminally under rated Timothy Dalton in The Living Daylights) they’re all discreet, fast, luxurious and grown-up cars for gentleman that sometimes want to go really fast. Not flashy hypercars craving the attention of everyone around.
And who has ever thought, when wanting to buy an SUV, ‘I must see what Aston Martin’s offering looks like’? That’s right, no one. It’s not what you think of for the brand; they’ve stretched too far and snapped. They need to take a long hard look at their strategy (and then their manufacturing and pricing). Decide what they really are and who they’re for. In trying to be all things to all people they’ve forgotten what makes them Aston Martin and why people covet them.
— Know your audience
