It takes a ton of work to make a brand extension like this seem like it belongs. But it does for a reason.
Maybe I live under a rock, but until shortly before I wrote about the Lamborghini stroller, I had no idea there even was such a thing.
Then I discovered there are Lamborghini phones too.
Of course there are. 🪨
The newest one is the TECNO POVA 8 Pro 5G Tonino Lamborghini Limited Edition, launched this month. It has a 6.78-inch AMOLED display, a 6500mAh battery, a MediaTek Dimensity 7400 Ultimate processor and a 50MP main camera.
But the specifications ain’t the most interesting part.
The standard POVA 8 Pro and the Lamborghini version are essentially the SAME phone underneath. The differentiation is in the design.
The back uses 177 individually controlled mini-LEDs to draw the Tonino Lamborghini “L” in light. There’s a red Pulse Line with a layered optical effect, honeycomb and shield-inspired patterns, custom black-and-red icons, boot animations, wallpapers, ringtones, a matching cable and a carbon-fibre-look case.
TECNO says the software work alone took close to four months.
That’s a crap ton of effort for something that doesn’t make the phone any faster.
Which is exactly the thing.
Luxury collabs often take the easy route.
You know, slap the famous badge on an ordinary product.
Change the colour.
Crank up the price.
Done-zo.
There have certainly been Lamborghini phones like that before.
Tonino Lamborghini sold the 88 Tauri for about $6,000 back in 2015, with hand-stitched leather and gold plating wrapped around hardware that was already aging.
Later models still leaned heavily on materials, exclusivity and the name itself.
This one zigs where the others zagged. (Or vice-versa… I get those confused.)
TECNO tried to translate the visual grammar associated with Lamborghini into another product category: angular geometry, performance cues, lighting, mechanical textures, black and red.
You can debate all day long whether a phone needs ANY of that.
But you can see what they were trying to do.
And that gets back to why I wrote recently about that Lambo stroller.
Automobili Lamborghini has also been extending its design language into products such as the limited-edition Silver Cross Reef stroller, explicitly positioning precision engineering, bold geometry and craftsmanship as portable pieces of the brand WAY beyond cars.
The appeal is pretty obvious.
Most people who covet a Lamborghini supercar will never own one.
But a Lambo stroller, phone, watch, suitcase or pair of headphones creates a much cheaper route into some portion of that identity.
One of the ideas I explore in I Need That is that people don’t buy products in a vacuum. They also pay for what those products say about them.
That’s why a logo can carry so much commercial power.
But there’s a limit.
If you can put the badge on absolutely anything, eventually it starts doing less work.
The smartest brand extensions preserve enough of the original brand’s character that the new product still seems related to the source.
The TECNO phone doesn’t stop at sayin’ Lamborghini on the back.
It tries to behave visually like one.
And if you’re the kind of person who wants your phone to look like it belongs in the same garage as a supercar, that might even be the whole point.
If you’d like help creating and marketing products people feel compelled to buy, the product marketing consultants at Graphos Product can help.