Tesla doesn’t have an official advertising budget to spend on budget, as it has almost been null over the years. Indeed, Tesla leveraged a combination of Elon musk’s ability to generate significant media coverage and build a product that sold via word of mouth and directly to consumers.
Dissecting Tesla’s Marketing strategy
Tesla’S business model has three major components that make it up.

On the supply side:
- Vertical Integration: Tesla famously integrated its whole manufacturing process, starting in its early days, when this strategy was not easy nor cheap to follow. Indeed, companies usually achieve vertical integration as they reach a major scale. Instead, Tesla did the opposite. It started to integrate from its inception vertically. This led the company to the verge of bankruptcy on multiple occasions. While finally, Tesla started to rip the benefit of vertical integration only in the 2020s onward.
- Direct distribution is another critical element of Tesla’s business strategy. Indeed, since its inception, Tesla has been looking for ways to sell directly to consumers through its stores, inspired by Apple’s direct-to-consumer strategy.
Today Tesla has reached an incredible scale in terms of manufacturing, passing over a million delivered cars in 2022.

Thus, generating over $81 billion in revenue in 2022, primarily from the automotive segment.

Indeed, the automotive segment also carries most of the gross margins and profits for Tesla, thus showing a completely different picture compared to a few years ago, before Tesla had reached mass scale.

And yet, Tesla spends zero dollars on advertising.
That has been thanks to the ability of the company to generate significant media coverage, which has been continuously driving sales.
These sales dollars have been invested in product, R&D, and scale.

Thus, Tesla’s marketing flywheel combines buzz through Media coverage, direct distribution, and investments into the product, which might generate further word-of-mouth and scale.
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