Jaguar Rebrand. A misstep and an inspired Hail Mary
It’s easy to dunk on the new thing.
Jaguar, the storied British car manufacturer (celebrating its 90th anniversary next year), recently unveiled a complete rebrand, including new versions of the iconic wordmark, leaping Jaguar, and “Growler” logos; a new tagline, “Copy nothing” and a new strategy: An all-electric range of luxury cars starting at $100,000 and aimed at a younger, albeit still affluent demographic.
To promote this seismic change, the brand update came complete with a 30-second teaser video featuring a diverse group of models wearing brightly colored outlandish futuristic clothing in different sets: A yellow elevator, blue corridor, and a purplish landscape reminiscent of a set from the original Star Trek series, minus Tribbles. Also missing was any kind of car, Jaguar or otherwise.
The response from the internet to the rebrand (and especially the video) was, to say the least, “not great, Bob.” Even Elon weighed in, tweeting, “Do you sell cars?” Hilarious (well, no, not really).
In a piece titled, “Jaguar boss defends ‘bold’ rebranding after backlash over video,” the Financial Times wrote the following (emphasis ours):
“The Jaguar campaign drew more than 160mn views on social media but also the ire of some car enthusiasts, activists and influencers who were angered that the 90-year-old brand was “going woke” and “throwing away heritage”.
Jaguar managing director Rawdon Glover said in an interview with the Financial Times that the intended message had been lost in “a blaze of intolerance” on social media and denied that the promotional video was intended as a “woke” statement.
“If we play in the same way that everybody else does, we’ll just get drowned out. So we shouldn’t turn up like an auto brand,” Glover said.”
Glover makes a good point about “getting drowned out.” Jaguar has been inexorably fading into irrelevance, like Bing Bong in Riley’s memory, since the late 1990s. Back then, Jaguar was trying to escape its reputation as a car brand aimed at middle-aged accountants and bank managers, with only limited success.
In more recent years, the company upped its game a bit and introduced some genuinely good cars, particularly the F-Pace SUV (built on the same chassis and sharing many components with the Range Rover Velar—which honestly I prefer) and the sporty F-Type, which, despite a reputation for a harsh ride, is by all accounts, an absolutely mega car for the money; it’s almost half the price of an Aston Martin Vantage.
Jaguar also makes the all electric I-PACE, launched in 2018 to great reviews (it was named World Car of the Year in 2019 and selected for use by Waymo). However, recently, the I-PACE, like many other European electric cars, has suffered from increased competition from much cheaper, newer models, particularly from China.
In fact, Jaguar seems to have been failing on all fronts. Being the cheaper option for Range Rover or Aston Martin is hardly inspiring or aspirational market positioning, especially for a new generation who seems intent on shying away from car ownership in general.
I’ve often said that brand heritage is either a blessing or a curse—nostalgia is worthless unless a brand can retain relevance and excitement for the future—and Jaguar's is most definitely a curse. The company is being strangled by past glories (the last E-Type rolled off the production line in 1974) and an audience's rose-tinted view of the marque. People love Jaguar for what it was, not for what it is or has been for several decades.
Jaguar seems to have decided it’s time to blow it all up and do something radical. From a purely strategic perspective, rebranding Jaguar as a 100% electric, modern, technologically advanced, luxury-focused car brand with a price tag to match (effectively doubling the current prices) seems like a logical move to me: It clearly delineates the Jaguar brand from being the slightly boring, beige version of both Aston Martin and Land Rover/Range Rover. I also confess that I find the irony of a marque well-known in the US during the 60s and 70s for having dodgy electrics (slight trigger warning and slight Mad Men spoiler) become an entirely electric brand rather ironic. It has very British fuck off vibes.
However, strategy is nothing without great creative. Before we get into that, let me first say it’s easy to dunk on the new thing.
Redesigning any well-known brand often causes people to lose their shit. Remember the brouhaha when Yves Saint Laurent updated their original wordmark? Or when Burberry changed theirs (more than once)? How about British Airways’ colorful tail designs (Margret Thatcher hated them) or, more recently, KIA or Lamborghini? Even tech companies get roasted for their brand updates, most famously AirBnB, but Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all come in for their fair share of criticism for the slightest design tweak. People often demand change and then hate it when it happens.
And now Jaguar has rebranded itself with a wordmark that makes it look less like a car company and more like a technology company. It has replaced their growling cat logo with a design consisting of two Js (one perennially upside down to represent the lowercase ‘r’ at the end of Jaguar) that look more reminiscent of a fashion company's motif than a car logo. I see both as a bold move. Yet clearly, I am in the minority, at least online: I’ve seen a lot of comments along the lines of “they’ve torched their entire heritage!” flooding social media. Perhaps we all need to calm down. I’m sure we’ll get over it. I promise.
As for the teaser video, it’s important to stress that it is just a teaser video. Good or bad, we’ll soon forget about it. That being said, okay, I agree, it’s a bit fucking weird. At the risk of me doing exactly what I said we shouldn’t do—dunking on the new thing—this is genuinely the first time I have seen something that looks like GenAI-created content that isn’t AI-generated.
Jaguar’s internal design agency obviously went to some lengths (and undoubted expense) to film this video for real. Maybe they shouldn’t have bothered. I personally think it looks like the United Colors of Benetton campaign fused with the Tellytubbies. I don’t know what the creative team was going for, but whatever it was, they made a pastiche of their own idea by accident. It’s like they made a sketch of their own ad for SNL. They’d have been better off using an actual SNL sketch instead.
Irrespective of my dunking on it and all the online criticism it’s received—to say nothing of the awful, downright racist hatred—this 30-second teaser video is, on the whole, a massive success. Google trends for Jaguar climbed so vertiginously that, in the words of my colleague Ross, “A goat couldn't climb a mountain this steep.”
The launch of Jaguar’s rebrand has gained a level of unearned media that most brands can only dream of. If this new range of electric cars looks amazing, then everyone will forget about the silly teaser video, get over their distaste of the new wordmark and logos, and move on. And if the cars are meh, no harm, no foul; Jaguar was in a bad place anyway. This is, and was, a complete Hail Mary, and in all honesty, I think it might just work. We’ll see.
In the words of Oscar Wilde, “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” We’re certainly talking and writing about Jaguar. And that hasn’t happened for years.