How Luxury Car Brands Are Redefining Marketing: Three Industry Highlights

The automotive industry has always been synonymous with innovation, but in recent years, luxury car manufacturers have shifted their creative energy beyond engineering marvels to marketing breakthroughs.

Why We Chose the Car Market

The automotive industry offers unique advantages for analyzing modern marketing trends due to its measurable online presence (Figure 1) with millions of posts over the last five years. Using social listening with Infegy Starscape, we identified a few key highlights that stood out among some of the industry's leading players. These brands must balance their heritage of precision and performance with the need to connect with evolving consumer demographics and digital-native audiences. By examining recent trends in automotive marketing, we can uncover strategies that are reshaping how luxury brands across various industries approach authentic audience engagement.

Figure 1: Luxury car market conversations (September 2020 - September 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

Highlight 1: Collaborations with Celebrities and Influencers

Porsche x BlackPink (Jennie)

In 2022, Porsche made a bold move that would shift their audience demographics: a full custom 911 collaboration with Jennie, the globally recognized K-pop singer from BlackPink (Figure 2). This wasn't merely a celebrity endorsement—it was a carefully crafted partnership that merged automotive excellence with pop culture influence.

Figure 2: Post embed of the Jennie collab (September 2020 - September 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

The collaboration caused mentions surrounding the Porsche brand to spike dramatically (Figure 3), but more importantly, it achieved something unprecedented in the brand's social media history.

Figure 3: Luxury car market Porsche conversions (September 2020 - September 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

For the first and only time in 2022, Porsche's net gender ratio—typically skewing heavily male—shifted to predominantly female (Figure 4). This demographic flip represented more than just numbers; it demonstrated the power of strategic celebrity partnerships to genuinely expand market reach rather than simply amplify existing audiences.

Figure 4: Luxury car market Porsche Net Gender (September 2020 - September 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

Mercedes-Benz x Fashion TikToker

Mercedes-Benz took a different but equally strategic approach during the same period, collaborating with a TikToker whose content rarely intersected with the automotive scene. The brand partnered with Wisdom Kaye (13.8 million followers), a high-fashion creative known for his ability to style anything. He created multiple videos that garnered millions of views (Figure 5). He was able to position their vehicles within the high-fashion lifestyle ecosystem, reaching an audience that views cars as extensions of their aesthetic identity.

Figure 5: One of the Wisdom Kaye x Mercedes-Benz Ads (September 2020 - September 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

During the time of the first of his video ads, the Mercedes models prominently featured at the beginning transitioned from being one of the top discussed to the most talked-about Mercedes topic (Figure 6). This surge in conversation shows the impact of Kaye's unique positioning strategy, where luxury automotive and high fashion converged in the social media space.

Figure 6: Luxury car market Mercedes-Benz topic cloud (Oct 2022 to Nov 2022); Infegy Social Dataset.

Why It’s Interesting

These trends demonstrate that car companies are revolutionizing influencer partnerships by moving beyond simple product placement to embedding themselves into creators' authentic narratives. Porsche's collaboration with Jennie showed how luxury brands can transcend traditional demographic boundaries through culturally relevant partnerships. Mercedes-Benz's partnership with Wisdom Kaye revealed how collaborating with creators can unlock new audience segments. Mercedes tapped into a community that views cars as extensions of personal aesthetic identity, demonstrating the potential for automotive brands to find resonance in creative spaces.

Highlight 2: Brand Partnerships

BMW x KITH

BMW's collaboration with KITH represents a masterclass in luxury brand partnership strategy. Rather than partnering with another established automotive or traditional luxury brand, BMW chose to align with KITH in October 2022 (Figure 7), a streetwear and lifestyle brand that has carved out a unique position at the intersection of high fashion and street culture. It was able to pierce through overall BMW conversations for not only their male audience but also their female audience as well (Figures 8 and 9). This is because they leveraged Kith’s younger audience with the longer legacy of their own brand to create a limited edition M4 competition that only had 150 made in total.

Figure 7: Luxury car market BMW conversations (September 2020 - September 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

Figure 8: Luxury car market female word cloud (September 2020 - September 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

Figure 9: Luxury car market male word cloud (September 2020 - September 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

Why It’s Interesting

This collaboration illustrates that luxury brands can achieve significant impact by partnering with newer, culturally relevant brands rather than only pursuing traditional luxury partnerships. BMW's choice to work with KITH showed how established luxury brands can maintain their prestige while accessing the cultural currency of emerging lifestyle brands, creating a bridge between traditional luxury and contemporary culture.

Highlight 3: Racing and Luxury Brands

Ferrari x Lewis Hamilton

Ferrari has long been synonymous with luxury sports cars, and their Formula One presence has been integral to maintaining this reputation. When consumers consider luxury sports vehicles, speed and performance are paramount concerns, making F1 racing the perfect showcase for automotive excellence and innovation.

Ferrari's Formula One team generates constant social media conversation regardless of specific advertising efforts, but their strategic signing of Lewis Hamilton in early 2024 amplified this effect dramatically. The partnership created a perfect storm of brand mentions, with both Ferrari and Hamilton being referenced in every subsequent conversation spike. (Figure 10) This demonstrates how strategic athlete partnerships can create sustained brand visibility that extends far beyond race weekends.

Figure 10: Luxury car market Ferrari conversations (September 2020 - September 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

Audi x F1 Entry 2026

Audi's announcement of their 2026 Formula One entry created immediate social media impact (Figure 11), generating conversation starting in 2022 around the prospect of it. The F1 ecosystem provides a unique platform where sports performance and luxury branding converge naturally, allowing automotive brands to showcase their engineering capabilities while building emotional connections with audiences who value both competition and excellence.

Figure 11: Luxury car market Audi conversions (September 2020 - September 2025); Infegy Social Dataset.

Formula One's global reach and passionate fanbase create an ideal environment for luxury car brands like Audi, allowing them to demonstrate their performance credentials while accessing audiences who are already invested in automotive innovation and competition.

Why It’s Interesting

Racing and the Formula One community have become essential components of luxury car brand strategy, providing ongoing visibility and credibility in the performance automotive space. The beauty of F1 partnerships lies in their organic nature—simply having a team ensures consistent brand exposure and conversation. Ferrari's experience demonstrates this perfectly: every major conversation spike around the brand correlates with their F1 activities, keeping the company at the forefront of consumer consciousness and reinforcing their performance heritage. And seeing this, it comes as no surprise that Audi wants in on it.

Conclusion

The luxury automotive industry's marketing evolution reveals three critical insights about modern brand strategy. First, demographic expansion requires authentic cultural partnerships, not just broader advertising—as demonstrated by Porsche's successful shift into female audiences through strategic K-pop collaboration. Second, luxury brands can maintain prestige while accessing new cultural territories by partnering with lifestyle brands that share their values but reach different audiences. Finally, performance-based partnerships like Formula One provide sustainable, long-term brand visibility that reinforces core brand values while generating consistent audience engagement.

Key Takeaways:

1. Cultural partnerships drive measurable demographic expansion - Strategic collaborations with culturally relevant figures can affect traditional audience demographics, as seen with Porsche's shift to a female-majority audience through their Jennie partnership.
2. Diversified influencer strategies maximize market penetration - Brands achieve greater reach by partnering with creators from different content categories simultaneously, allowing them to strengthen core audiences while expanding into new territories.
3. Performance-based partnerships provide sustainable brand visibility - Long-term commitments to racing and sports create ongoing conversation opportunities that consistently reinforce brand values without requiring constant new campaign development.