This September, IAA Transportation and InnoTrans put different parts of mobility under the spotlight. For us, the opportunity is to look across categories, software and emerging technologies, exploring how they can combine in new ways to reshape connected brand experiences.
IAA Transportation in Hanover brings commercial vehicles, logistics and transport together around software-defined vehicles, electrification, autonomous systems, AI and connected infrastructure. A week later, InnoTrans in Berlin looks at many of the same forces through rail and public transport.
The sectors are very different, but that is partly what makes having both events so close together interesting to us.
At Dusted, we spend a lot of time understanding the category we are working in, but we also deliberately look outside it. Often the freshest strategic and creative ideas come from seeing how another category or industry has solved a similar problem, created a better experience, or set new expectations.
Mobility feels particularly ripe for that kind of thinking. Commercial transport is trying to make increasingly sophisticated technology easier and more useful for drivers and operators. Rail is bringing digital services, passenger experience and physical environments closer together. Passenger automotive is becoming as influenced by consumer technology, media and software as it is by traditional automotive engineering.
There is plenty they can learn from one another. And behind all of them sits a shift we find especially interesting from a brand perspective.
Vehicles and transport systems are becoming more connected, intelligent and software defined. The technology is advancing rapidly, but having more capability does not automatically make one experience better or more distinctive than another.
Software may increasingly define what mobility can do. Brand can define what that experience means.
Shared technology can still create distinctive experiences
Vehicles have always relied on technology and components supplied by other businesses. What is changing is how much of that technology now directly shapes the experience people have of the brand.
Navigation, connectivity, entertainment, operating systems, voice, AI, charging and increasingly autonomous capability all sit somewhere between the user and the manufacturer. Many of those capabilities will quite rightly come from specialist partners. There is little value in every OEM independently recreating technology that somebody else already does exceptionally well.
But as more manufacturers have access to increasingly sophisticated versions of the same underlying technologies, capability alone becomes less useful as a point of difference. We think building difference, and in turn competitive advantage, can come from how those ingredients are brought together.
What does the experience prioritise? How does it respond? What deserves a distinctive identity of its own? What remains quietly in the background? How do the interface, sound, physical environment and wider service add up to something distinctly recognisable?
Technology can be shared without the experience feeling generic. And that feels like fertile territory for brand.
The dashboard is becoming shared brand space
Passenger automotive is where this becomes particularly visible.
IAA Transportation is primarily concerned with commercial transport, while InnoTrans takes us into rail and public mobility. But people bring an unusually rich set of expectations into a passenger car because they already live within sophisticated digital ecosystems elsewhere.
Our phones recognise us. Apps remember preferences. Entertainment follows us between devices. Navigation adapts in real time. Interfaces increasingly learn, simplify and personalise. Those expectations arrive in the vehicle with us.
At the same time, manufacturers are creating their own increasingly sophisticated digital environments. The dashboard is becoming shared brand space, where OEM systems, specialist technologies and familiar third-party platforms can all coexist.
That makes the experience more interesting than simply deciding who owns the screen. If someone chooses their preferred navigation or entertainment ecosystem, what still makes the overall experience feel distinctly Mahindra, Mini, Mercedes or Maserati?
And if manufacturers want drivers to choose their own digital environments rather than default to something familiar from their phone, those experiences must be genuinely useful, intuitive and enjoyable. People will not use an inferior experience simply because it belongs to the car brand.
The opportunity is to understand which parts of the experience are worth making distinctively yours, then make them good enough to matter.
Look outward; build from within
There is a reason we deliberately look outside the category. Familiar conventions can become limiting, particularly when the product itself has changed faster than the way people talk about it.
We saw that with Mahindra. Looking at its new EVs only through established automotive codes missed a large part of what made them exciting. The connected operating environment, high-end audio, lighting and media experience started to feel closer to premium consumer technology and entertainment than to the way Mahindra’s ICE vehicles had traditionally been framed.
In some respects, the experience available inside the vehicle was better than the technology many people had at home. So, we widened the frame of reference. We looked at consumer electronics, mobile technology, fashion, entertainment and lifestyle, which helped us understand the product differently and gave us fresher ways to express what made it valuable.
But looking elsewhere for inspiration is not the same as abandoning the equity people already value. Automotive is full of brands with decades of accumulated meaning. The creative challenge is often to work out which codes belong to yesterday and which still carry something worth protecting, then find a contemporary way to bring that equity back to life.
Jaguar’s recent reinvention makes that tension very visible. The brand says its new ‘Copy Nothing’ direction returns to Sir William Lyons’ founding belief that a Jaguar should be original rather than derivative. That is a legitimate piece of heritage to recover. But the strength of the response to the new identity and Type 00 also shows how quickly radical change can be read as discontinuity when people feel too many familiar equities have disappeared at once.
There is some commercial context worth watching, although it needs to be treated carefully. Brand Finance’s UK 250 2026 says Jaguar led the decline among UK automotive brands, in a sector whose total brand value fell 22%. It would be simplistic to claim the rebrand caused that. JLR itself points to the deliberate wind-down of legacy Jaguar models, tariffs and other operational factors affecting volumes. The useful lesson is that a brand reset of this scale happens against real commercial risk, not in a creative vacuum.
Ferrari Luce gives us a more recent version of the same debate from another direction. Jony Ive and LoveFrom have brought an outside-category design sensibility, closely associated with Apple, into Ferrari’s first EV. The reaction was sharply divided, and Ferrari’s shares fell as much as 8% on the day of the reveal as investors weighed whether the design moved too far from familiar Ferrari cues. Yet the story did not stop there. Subsequent reporting says Ferrari reached its 2026 Luce sales target within two months.
That makes it a much more useful example than declaring the design a success or a failure. Reinvention can provoke discomfort precisely because it changes the terms of the category. The question is whether the new expression still carries enough of the distinctive meaning that made the brand valuable in the first place.
For us, the best reinvention does not simply keep the old codes or discard them. It understands the equity behind them, then finds a new way to make that equity relevant.
This is another reason the September events are so useful. We can look at what is emerging in freight, commercial transport and rail, then watch how some of those ideas travel – or do not travel – into passenger automotive as the season moves towards Paris Motor Show in October. The inspiration should work both ways, but it should always be filtered through the brand rather than copied wholesale.
Brand experience lives in behaviour, not just appearance
This is where the creative possibilities become much richer than carrying a visual identity into an interface.
Typography, colour and graphic language matter because they help everything feel connected, but the deeper expression of the brand comes through how the experience behaves. The language used to describe a feature can make something highly technical feel accessible or desirable. Motion can make an interface feel calm and precise or fast and energetic. Sound can reassure, reward or create anticipation. Personalisation can feel genuinely useful rather than becoming another set of menus to navigate.
Even apparently functional choices communicate character. A performance-focused brand may want the experience to feel immediate and responsive. Another may build around calm confidence, reducing information and intervention rather than adding to it.
The interface should not simply look like the brand. The whole experience should feel like it belongs to it.
Although automotive brands have the clear advantage that they can be experienced with almost every sense, yet too many still behave as if brand identity begins and ends with a logo, colour palette and typeface. While a distinctive HMI typeface adds value, the greater opportunity lies in orchestration of sound, light, materials, tactility and interaction. These aren’t decorative details. They are brand. When every sensory touchpoint feels unmistakably yours, you stop creating interfaces and start creating memorable brand experiences. In a category where technology and performance are increasingly converging, brand experience becomes a truly defensible form of differentiation
Paul Marten, Creative Director at Dusted
Better does not always mean more
Looking across mobility also stops us assuming that a better connected experience always means adding more entertainment, more features or more interaction.
For a commercial driver spending hours on the road, better may mean the technology almost disappearing. With less cognitive load, clearer information, easier route and charging decisions, fewer interruptions and systems that work predictably. For an operator, it may be the way vehicle, fleet and service data are joined up so that the technology removes friction rather than creates another layer of it.
Public transport introduces a different version of the same problem. A passenger may judge the experience through ticketing, wayfinding, accessibility, service information and how easily the digital and physical journey connect. InnoTrans itself reflects that overlap, bringing together vehicle technology, interiors, mobility services and an AI Mobility Lab within the same event.
The contexts are different, but the principle is similar. Technology needs to become something people can understand, use and value.
Sometimes another category provides the better reference point. Commercial-vehicle interface design may have something to teach passenger automotive about reducing distraction. Hospitality may have more useful lessons for service recovery than transport itself. Consumer electronics has spent years making sophisticated functionality intuitive. Retail understands how to introduce unfamiliar products without expecting people to read a manual first.
Looking outside the category does not mean ignoring category expertise. It means knowing the category well enough to recognise when its established conventions are no longer giving you the best answer.
Making the experience real
Our work with Mahindra EV is a strong example of what that means in practice.
We worked from the brand and category idea into the experience itself: MAIA gave Mahindra’s software and artificial-intelligence architecture its own identity and story; we developed language and nomenclature for in-car systems and advanced features, helped shape HMI thinking, briefed the sonic experience with A.R. Rahman, and carried the same thinking through test drives, dealerships, launches and campaigns.
The value was in making all those touchpoints feel connected, turning advanced technology into a coherent brand experience rather than a collection of separate features. The customer does not experience the organisation chart behind a vehicle. They do not care which department created the interface, commissioned the sound, named a feature or designed the retail journey. They experience one car and, ultimately, one brand.
That sounds obvious, but it becomes harder to achieve as more internal teams, technologies and external partners contribute to the overall experience.
The companies behind the experience have an opportunity too
Our work with Cubic³ gave us another perspective on the same issue.
Cubic³ sits largely behind the visible customer experience, providing software-defined connectivity to OEMs across automotive, transport and agriculture. One of the things we recognised was that describing the company simply through its technical of connectivity understated the value it was creating.
The more interesting story was what that connectivity enabled OEMs to do such as creating new services, operating intelligently across markets and building richer connected experiences around their vehicles.
That feels increasingly relevant to technology businesses across mobility. As their products become more deeply embedded in somebody else’s customer experience, they have an opportunity to move beyond selling specifications and functionality. The stronger story can be about the experience, advantage or new commercial opportunity they make possible for their customers.
Our approach is not just to explain what technology does, but to show what this enables people to do differently.
The experience starts long before the screen lights up
There is another reason we think connected experience needs to be viewed more broadly than the interface itself.
If a new technology genuinely changes the product, customers still have to notice it and understand why it matters. That experience might start in advertising or editorial content before they see the vehicle. A launch can dramatise something difficult to explain in specifications. A dealership may need to introduce capabilities that did not exist when traditional automotive retail conventions were established. A test drive may need to demonstrate software, sound and connected services just as deliberately as it demonstrates acceleration or handling.
And increasingly the story carries on after purchase. When software updates can add functionality over time, brands have new reasons to maintain a relationship with customers and new opportunities to make the ownership experience feel alive rather than finished at the point of sale.
With Mahindra we were able to think across those moments together. From brand and product through interfaces, test-drive journeys and dealership environments to the campaigns that brought everything to market. In some cases, highly technical features were translated into simple human comparisons so people could quickly grasp what they meant in everyday life.
We were not trying to make sophisticated technology sound less sophisticated. We were trying to make its value easier to feel.
Joined-up experiences need joined-up thinking
All of this becomes difficult when product, engineering, software, UX, brand, retail and marketing operate as a relay race.
One team creates the capability, another organises the interface, brand arrives later to make it consistent, and marketing must then explain why anybody should care. By that stage, many of the choices that could have made the experience distinctive have already been made.
Our strongest work tends to happen when those disciplines overlap earlier. Product understanding starts informing brand strategy. Brand thinking influences how a feature is framed or experienced. Creative teams understand the technology deeply enough to find more interesting ways of expressing it.
That way of working is more demanding because different teams naturally have different priorities. But if experience is becoming a greater source of brand preference, then it needs to be considered while the product is still taking shape, rather than being wrapped around it afterwards.
Make the technology yours
IAA Transportation and InnoTrans should give us plenty to think about this September. We will see different vehicles, different technologies and very different definitions of what a better mobility experience looks like.
That variety is what makes them useful. Some ideas will remain particular to freight, fleets or rail. Others will travel across sectors, evolve and show up somewhere unexpected. Then, as passenger automotive takes centre stage again in Paris, we will be watching to see which technologies simply migrate into cars and which are transformed into experiences that feel genuinely new.
Technology will continue to improve, spread and become expected. Having access to it will not always be enough to make a brand distinctive.
What matters increasingly is what you do with it. That includes how well you understand the people using it, which existing equities still matter, what you choose to foreground, where you create character, what you simplify, what you name, what you leave invisible, and how all those choices add up across product, digital, communications and the wider experience.
Shared technology can still create very different brands. Software can define what mobility does. Brand should define what the experience means.
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