Racing partnerships are important to Brembo marketing.
Daniele Schillaci is moving Brembo past the pandemic with a grand new strategic plan that depends on everything from an innovative new brake-disc coating to helping make motorsports cool to Generation Z.
As CEO since July 2019 of the half-century-old, iconic brake supplier based in Italy, Schillaci recently publicized his plan to “break new ground” in Brembo’s intensifying “journey to become a respected solutions provider” to automakers in North America and around the world that are seeking stronger partnerships with key suppliers.
“We’re a highly respected company with a strong brand,” Schillaci told me recently. “This is not a reinvention. It’s just a step up in our way of doing business in a world that is changing rapidly and continuously through geopolitics, technology and so on. And COVID is accelerating the volatility. The best way to stay on top isn’t to be satisfied with what you’re doing.”
To that end, Schillaci has hatched a plan with several significant aspects: enhancing Brembo’s digitization and overall innovation, adding to its global presence, and playing up its rising status as what he called “a cool brand” via increasing utilization of its highly recognizable red calipers in premium and sports cars around the world.
Schillaci said in a recent press presentation that “now is the right time to do more to help our partners. Today we are a respected product supplier. But we need now to move more and more to become a solution provider, challenging ourselves. You always need to reinvent yourself, especially now with technology moving extremely fast.
“The difference between a respected product supplier and a solution provider is that product suppliers fill gaps. Now, we need to do more, [establish] a hand-to-hand process for helping customers anticipate new customer needs. That’s why we felt we need to move the company toward becoming a solution provider.”
A key pillar of Schillaci’s approach with new technology is Greentive, the name Brembo gave to a new brake-disc technology that features a new layer of coating applied to its ring. Greentive — fusing the words “green” and “distinctive” — significantly extends the disc life cycle by reducing brake dust, keeping rims cleaner as well as cutting emissions. The Greentive coating also offers a high level of corrosion resistance, which Brembo said is particularly important to new generations of electric cars where braking systems are used differently.
“The target [of Greentive] is to reduce resistance, to avoid impact between the friction material and the disc when the car is running,” said Alessandro Ciotti, Brembo’s director of advanced R&D, in a recent press briefing. “To do that, we have to take into account a lot of [factors] including temperature, force, conditions of the road and the ambient environment.”
Schillaci plans to encourage more such innovation by creating new “centers of excellence in [the company’s] main regions for creating cross-fertilization of innovation,” as he put it in the press briefing. The centers will be in the United States, China, India and Europe.
“They will be located in these different places to make us faster in creation and implementation of new technologies,” Ciotti said. “This also will give us an opportunity to have kind of a different mind of people inside the organization, a diversity in mind and approach.”
In elaborating, Schillaci told me that the creation of these new R&D centers “is a natural consequence of our new vision and mission. Already today, we have R&D departments in our entities, such as in North America. But how can we be close to where the technology is but also at the same time leverage diversity by employing people locally who challenge Brembo on new technologies, ideas and solutions?”
Schillaci expects Brembo to be challenged during his tenure by having to help automakers worldwide deal with braking systems for electric vehicles as well as for legacy gasoline and diesel technologies. He said the company also is gearing up to address the digitally oriented demands of developing braking systems for autonomous vehicles. But Schillaci told me he sees the horizon for fully autonomous, “level 5” systems receding.
“Except maybe for robotaxis, which are feasible in the next two to three years,” he said. “But if you ask the same question [about autonomous vehicles] for a private customer who buys a car and wants to sleep in the car and go from point A to point B — I don’t see that in the short or the mid term. Maybe at the beginning of the next decade.”
In the meantime, Schillaci believes a bigger possibility than Level 5 autonomous driving is a dwindling of interest in motorsports by younger consumers globally. Brembo already is a cool brand, with its iconic, exposed red calipers adorning some of the world’s most expensive and exciting vehicles.
“We have high [brand] awareness across the world, and leading activities in motorsport underpin our strong brand positioning,” Schillaci told me. “We also want to be a timeless brand, meaning we want to attract a new generation — Generation Z. All these very young people that are viewing the automotive industry and the product itself in a totally different way.
“We’d like to make sure Gen Z perceives how we’ve perceived Brembo as a cool brand. So it’s where we want to work a bit more on our marketing point of view.”
