CONTEXT - THE PROBLEM BENEATH THE PROBLEM

Luxury aviation marketing had gone limp - endless blue skies, sterile cabin shots, and “aspiration” clichés that meant nothing to the people actually signing checks.

In China - a market of immense cultural sophistication - we had to generate desire for a machine still in gestation. The core problem: you can’t market a prototype with imagery the market stopped believing in a decade ago.

This wasn’t another product launch.
It was a long-term seduction across a five-to-six-year timeline.

INSIGHT / MYTH - THE REALIZATION THAT REFRAMED EVERYTHING

Dassault doesn’t build aircraft the way Gulfstream does. They build them like the French build cathedrals - engineering as beauty. Or, as it is built into Dassault DNA, in the words of founder Marcel Dassault - "For an aircraft to fly well, it must be beautiful".

China’s luxury audience understands that language instinctively: symbolism, heritage, philosophy embedded inside form.

The insight was simple and daring:
Stop speaking aviation. Start speaking in archetypes.

A jet doesn’t sell itself through specs. It sells through myth - through the idea of what flying means at the level of culture. We needed to elevate Falcon from aircraft manufacturer to keeper of sky-born iconography.

THE LEAP - THE MOVE NO ONE ELSE WOULD HAVE MADE

I built three one-word cosmologies - AIRBORN, AVIANICS, SUN KING - each crafted as a symbolic container large enough to hold Dassault’s ambition and China’s appetite for layered meaning.

AIRBORN: the metaphysics of flight.

AVIANICS: the fusion of DNA ( a leitmotif in Dassault branding) and machine. An evolution.

SUN KING: the French cultural mythos of radiance, lineage, and mastery.

Each functioned as a narrative operating system, replacing sky-stock photography with idea-driven, culturally resonant aesthetics. They created intrigue, not information; anticipation, not explanation.

When the product doesn’t exist yet - you market the myth of what it will be.

IMPACT - THE SHIFT CAUSED

Falcon’s presence in China expanded dramatically because the brand’s gravitational field changed. The work reframed Dassault as the most culturally attuned, symbolically literate aviation brand in the region.

It cracked the market open for the rest of the fleet, shifting Falcon from ‘European jet company’ to ‘luxury aviation philosophy with French lineage.’

In just a few years, Dassault Falcon Jet’s footprint in China expanded dramatically — 29 Falcon 7Xs in operation made it the brand’s second-largest market worldwide.