Inside Lucid Motor’s Strategy to Win Hearts Before Sales

A sit-down with Lucid Motor's Senior Vice President of Marketing, Akerho Oghoghomeh

Author

Carlo Palomino
February 20, 2026

Welcome back to The Friday Fortune! If your calendar is packed but your motivation is running on fumes, congratulations, you’ve earned a few minutes of productive procrastination. Grab a coffee, ignore Slack for about five minutes, and settle in.

Each week, we sit down with the CMOs, brand builders, and cultural architects shaping what modern marketing actually looks like beyond the buzzwords. The ones balancing creativity with accountability, culture with commerce, and instinct with data.

This week’s episode of CMO Weekly is a masterclass in exactly that.

Here’s what’s on deck this week:

  • A sit-down with Lucid Motor Senior Vice President of Marketing, Akerho Oghoghomeh

  • OpenFortune x InTouch Credit Union

  • Target to test contextual ads in ChatGPT

📈 Marketer of the Week

If there’s anyone proving that brand building and performance don’t have to live in separate worlds, it’s Akerho Oghoghomeh—better known as AK—Senior Vice President of Marketing at Lucid Motors. With a career that spans chemical engineering, Red Bull’s cultural rise, the chaos of Beyond Meat, and now the future of luxury EVs, AK’s story is anything but linear, and that’s precisely why it works.

Raised in a family of engineers and scientists, AK began his career at DuPont as a chemical engineer before realizing he wanted to operate at a broader, more human scale. Business school led him into brand strategy, where he quickly discovered that data and creativity didn’t have to live in separate worlds. That mindset became a defining advantage as he moved into consumer marketing.

At Red Bull, AK joined during a pivotal moment when the brand was transitioning from underground phenomenon to mainstream icon. What he learned there shaped his philosophy for everything that followed: focus matters. Once Red Bull clearly defined who it was building for, the brand shifted from doing everything everywhere to showing up meaningfully in the places that mattered most. That precision helped fuel a historic year in which Red Bull sold 1.65 billion cans in the U.S. alone.

After additional experience at Amazon and a return to Red Bull to lead brand marketing across North America, AK took on one of his most complex challenges yet at Beyond Meat. There, marketing extended far beyond campaigns, into regulation, health advocacy, and public perception. The role sharpened his understanding of how deeply marketing can shape culture, policy, and consumer behavior all at once.

Now at Lucid Motors, AK is once again building at a moment of inflection. His mandate is clear: take an engineering-first company with world-class products and turn it into a culturally relevant brand that earns a place in the mainstream conversation. As he puts it, “We didn’t make the best EV, we made the best car.”

That philosophy came to life with Driven, a cinematic short film directed by James Mangold and starring Timothée Chalamet. Instead of defaulting to the typical automotive playbook, AK positioned the consumer (not the car) as the hero. The result was a story-driven launch that showcased performance, design, and emotion without feeling like an ad.

That momentum carried into Lucid’s high-octane follow-up featuring Chalamet alongside NBA stars Josh Hart and Jalen Brunson, an adrenaline-fueled interview conducted at 160 mph in the Lucid Sapphire. The campaign quickly became Lucid’s best-performing social launch to date, driving massive awareness while reinforcing the brand’s performance credentials.

For AK, awareness is just the start. When you're selling a six-figure product, the real work happens after someone notices you. His approach mixes big cultural moments with smart targeting, finding people who are actually shopping, then hitting them with layered storytelling that builds confidence without leaning on discounts.

AK notes that automotive is different from anything he's done before. Product cycles run years long, so you're constantly guessing where people will be, not where they are now. But it’s a challenge he genuinely enjoys. He thrives in ambiguity, embraces complexity, and pushes his teams to move fast without waiting for perfect conditions.

AK’s Takeaway

AK’s advice is deceptively simple, but deeply lived: “Say yes.” Say yes to discomfort. Say yes to learning new muscles. And say yes to blending emotion with evidence, because that’s where the most powerful marketing lives.

To hear more about how AK is building Lucid into a culturally relevant luxury brand and what it really takes to market the future, listen to the full episode of CMO Weekly.

Crack open a handful of the week’s best marketing links—because good fortune favors the curious.

That’s a wrap for this week’s Friday fortune.

If you enjoyed the read, pass it along to your favorite marketer who could use a little extra inspo in their inbox.

Until next time, may your marketing be memorable and your cookies always be fortunate!

— The OpenFortune team