Spyker's Points of Parity

When I joined Spyker Cars, the brand had five values. They lived on a PowerPoint slide somewhere, and they were: Performance, Design, Craftsmanship, Exclusivity, and Heritage.

Five words. All defensible. All true, even. Spyker was exclusive — the company produced fewer than fifty cars a year. It did have heritage — the Spijker brothers started building carriages in 1880, merged with a Dutch aircraft factory in 1914, and the motto Nulla Tenaci Invia Est Via had been on the badge for a century. Performance, craftsmanship, design — the C8 delivered on all three.

And yet, from the moment I read them, something felt off. Not because the values were wrong, but because they were interchangeable. Swap out “Spyker” for “Aston Martin” and nothing breaks. Replace it with “Bentley” and you lose nothing. Try “Ferrari” — still works. These weren’t brand values. They were category descriptors. They described the price segment, not the brand.

I couldn’t brief a campaign on “Exclusivity.” I couldn’t train a dealer on “Heritage.” I couldn’t evaluate a design proposal against “Design.” The words pointed in a general direction — luxury, quality, specialness — but they didn’t tell anyone what to do. And a brand value that can’t guide a decision isn’t a value. It’s decoration.

The problem with adjectives

Brand theory has a name for what was wrong. Kevin Lane Keller, in his work on customer-based brand equity, draws a distinction between points of parity and points of difference.¹ Points of parity are the associations a brand shares with its competitors — the category requirements it must meet to be considered a legitimate player. Points of difference are the attributes a brand can credibly claim as its own. Keller is specific about what qualifies: a genuine point of difference must be desirable to consumers, deliverable by the firm, and differentiating from competitors. That third criterion is where most brand values fail. They pass the first two tests and quietly skip the third.

Most brand value exercises produce nothing but points of parity. The process usually works something like this: a leadership team gathers, someone writes qualities on Post-it notes, the group clusters and debates, and by end of day you’ve converged on five or six words that everyone can agree on. Agreement is the problem. The values that survive a room full of stakeholders are the ones no one can object to — which means they’re the ones no one can own. They are, by definition, points of parity dressed in the language of differentiation.

“Premium.” “Innovative.” “Customer-centric.” “Authentic.” These words pass every internal test. They sound credible. They feel aspirational. They’re also empty. A useful heuristic: if the opposite of your brand value sounds absurd, the value says nothing.² No one announces “We value mediocrity.” No competitor positions itself as “Not customer-centric.” These aren’t differentiators. They’re hygiene factors — necessary but insufficient.

There’s a deeper structural problem, too. Jean-Noël Kapferer argues that brand identity is not a list but a system. His identity prism maps six facets — physique, personality, culture, relationship, reflection, and self-image — that together form a coherent whole.³ A flat list of adjectives collapses all of these dimensions into a single plane. “Heritage” might speak to culture. “Design” might speak to physique. “Exclusivity” might speak to reflection — how the customer sees themselves through the brand. But written side by side on a slide, they lose their relational structure. They don’t tell you how the brand’s personality connects to its culture, or how its physical expression reinforces its customer’s self-image. The result is a set of words that describe fragments of an identity without revealing how those fragments hold together.

David Aaker makes a related point. His brand identity system distinguishes between core identity — the timeless essence of the brand, the “single thought that captures the soul” — and extended identity, the surrounding elements that provide texture, richness, and completeness.⁴ A useful brand framework needs both: a stable centre and a structured periphery. Five adjectives on a slide provide neither. They’re too vague to serve as an essence and too sparse to function as an extended identity.

At Spyker, all five values failed these frameworks. “Performance” was true but indistinct — a point of parity in a segment where every car performs. “Craftsmanship” was real — the interiors were genuinely handmade — but Bentley and Rolls-Royce would claim the same without blinking. “Heritage” was legitimate — few brands trace their roots to 1880 — but heritage is Aston Martin’s entire positioning. In Keller’s terms, we had five points of parity and zero points of difference. In Kapferer’s terms, we had fragments scattered on a slide with no prism to hold them together. In Aaker’s terms, we had neither essence nor architecture. We had a list.

Finding the architecture

We brought in a brand consultancy. They were British, and their main business was developing and running the global training programme for Rolls-Royce dealers — the people who teach Rolls-Royce staff how to embody the brand in every customer interaction. That mattered. We weren’t looking for a creative agency to make pretty slides. We needed people who understood how brand values translate into behaviour, into training, into the thousand small decisions that happen between a company and its customers every day.

What came out of that process wasn’t a list. It was a system.

At the centre: Wow. An exclamation, not an adjective. The idea that the ultimate reaction to anything Spyker does — the car, the experience, the details — should be involuntary wonder. Not admiration. Not respect. A guttural, unplanned response.

Around that core, three pillars: Bold, Pure, and Engaging. Bold meant single-minded, beyond the limits of convention. Pure meant true to its values, displaying clarity of thought, concept, and execution. Engaging meant attracting and holding attention, creating a unique experience and occasion.

And radiating outward from those three pillars, a ring of supporting attributes: Individual. Confident. Uncompromising. Visceral. Sensory. Elegant. Timeless. Handcrafted. Authentic. Each one defined with precision. Each one connected to a pillar. Each one illustrated — not with pictures of cars, but with images of ocean waves, rock climbers, lone trees in deserts, gymnasts. The vocabulary was deliberate: these words belonged to a feeling, not a product category.

The whole thing was visualised as a series of concentric rings — an onion model. Core emotion at the centre, primary character traits in the middle, specific expressions at the edge. In hindsight, what we had built — without calling it this at the time — was essentially Aaker’s brand identity system made visual: a clear essence (“Wow”) at the gravitational centre, a core identity in the three pillars, and an extended identity in the outer ring. It also addressed Kapferer’s concern about structure: the attributes weren’t floating in isolation but were connected to the pillars they supported, which in turn served the core. The relationships were explicit, not implied.

It looked simple. It was, in fact, the most useful brand tool I’ve ever worked with.

What changed for the marketeer

The difference was operational.

“Exclusivity” never told me what to do. “Bold” did. When evaluating a dealer event concept, I could ask: is this bold? Does it go beyond convention? When reviewing copy, I could test it: is this pure — does it show clarity of concept, or is it cluttered and compromising? When designing a customer experience, I could measure against “Engaging” — does this attract and hold attention, or is it forgettable?

The outer ring was even more useful. “Visceral” — proceeding from instinct, alive and vibrant — told the engineers what the driving experience should feel like. “Sensory” — tantalising all the senses for a deeper, longer-lasting experience — told the interior team that every material the customer could see or touch had to reward that contact. “Uncompromising” — seeks the best solution, always delivers on time and above expectation — was as much a standard for operations as it was for product.

The old values described outcomes. The new architecture described how to get there. That’s the difference between a brand statement and a brand tool. A statement tells you what you want to be. A tool tells you what to do next.

There’s a practical consequence here that’s easy to overlook. When brand values are generic, every creative decision becomes a debate. Is this ad “premium” enough? Does this event feel “exclusive”? These are judgement calls with no anchor, and they tend to get resolved by whoever is most senior or most persuasive in the room. When values are specific and structured, the debate shifts. You’re no longer arguing taste. You’re measuring against a shared framework. It doesn’t eliminate disagreement, but it changes the quality of the disagreement.

What the customer actually feels

Customers don’t read brand onion diagrams. They don’t know your values exist. What they experience is the output of your values — the decisions those values enabled.

A Spyker customer didn’t think “Bold.” They noticed that the air inlets were shaped like turbine engines, that the doors opened vertically on a single hinge, that the ignition sequence involved flicking a red helicopter-style cover before pressing a start button. They didn’t think “Pure.” They noticed that the interior had essentially zero plastic — everything they could see or touch was leather, aluminium, or glass. They didn’t think “Handcrafted.” They noticed that the key fob was machined from a solid block of stainless steel with a polycarbonate window so you could see its inner workings, like the caseback of a fine watch.

The values worked because they were invisible. The customer experienced wonder — the “Wow” at the centre of the model — without ever needing to know why. The architecture did its job backstage. It told the designers what to prioritise, the engineers what to protect, the salespeople what stories to tell. By the time the customer sat in the car, the values had been fully metabolised into product.

This is the part that most brand exercises get wrong. They create values that are meant to be communicated to the customer — printed on the brochure, recited in the pitch. But the strongest brand values are the ones the customer never hears. They’re internal tools that shape external experiences. The customer doesn’t need to know your value is “Sensory.” The customer needs to feel the leather and understand, without being told, that someone cared about what it would be like to touch it.

The storytelling that follows

Here’s where specificity pays its largest dividend: in the stories you can tell.

Generic values produce generic stories. If your value is “Craftsmanship,” your story is “our skilled artisans carefully handcraft each…” — a sentence that could appear in any luxury brochure from watches to yachts. It’s true, it’s boring, and it’s interchangeable.

But when your value is “Authentic — genuine with real substance, displaying recognised quality,” you can tell the story of your leather supplier. You can explain that the hides come from a specific tannery, that the colder climate produces fewer insect bites and therefore more perfect hides, that the tannery earned its Royal designation for a century of service. When your value is “Timeless — instantly classic, automotive art true to its racing and aviation heritage,” you can explain how the propeller in the logo connects to the 1914 merger with the Dutch Aircraft Factory, and how the design language evolved from propeller-inspired wheels to turbine-inspired air scoops — a century of aviation DNA expressed through shape.

These aren’t stories about brand values. They’re stories that brand values made possible. The specificity of the value framework gave permission to go deep on details that would otherwise seem indulgent. When “Sensory” is an explicit value, you can talk at length about the sound of the exhaust, the weight of the key fob, the smell of the leather — and it isn’t tangential. It’s on-brand.

Generic values force generic storytelling because there’s no permission to be particular. Specific values create a mandate for specificity. And specificity is what makes a story memorable.

What Spyker got right — and what values can’t do

The brand work was genuinely good. Looking back, the onion model was one of the strongest things Spyker produced. It gave a tiny company — around a hundred employees — a shared language for making decisions. It aligned design, engineering, sales, and marketing around a common understanding of what made the brand distinctive. For a company that couldn’t outspend its competitors in any category, that internal alignment was worth more than any campaign.

But brand architecture doesn’t pay the bills. Spyker’s story is ultimately one of ambition outrunning capital. The brand was strong. The cars were remarkable. The financial foundation was not. No amount of brand clarity can substitute for the resources needed to manufacture, certify, distribute, and service a car at the level customers in this segment expect. The values told everyone what to do. The bank balance determined how much of it they could actually do.

That’s worth saying because there’s a temptation in marketing to treat brand as a magic layer — the thing that, if you just get it right, makes everything else work. It doesn’t. Brand is a multiplier. It multiplies the effectiveness of everything you do. But a multiplier applied to insufficient resources still produces insufficient results.

What remains from Spyker, for me, is the method. The understanding that brand values need to be architectural, not decorative. That they need to guide decisions, not just describe aspirations. That the test of a good value isn’t whether it sounds impressive in a boardroom, but whether it changes what someone does on a Tuesday morning when they’re choosing between two options and nobody is watching.

The test

If you want to evaluate your own brand values, here’s a simple exercise. Take each value and ask two questions:

First: could a direct competitor claim this value with a straight face? If yes, it’s not differentiating. It might be important — you might genuinely need to deliver on it — but it’s a category requirement, not a brand position.

Second: does this value tell someone what to do? Not what to aspire to. What to actually do. Can a designer use it to make a choice between two options? Can a salesperson use it to decide what story to tell? Can a copywriter use it to evaluate a headline? If the value can’t resolve a decision, it’s not operational. It’s ornamental.

The five values I inherited at Spyker failed both tests. The framework that replaced them passed both. That’s the difference between words on a slide and a brand you can build with.