Is this Jaguar, the blue chip brand on par with Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Rolls Royce – the brand standing for sleek and elegant sports cars which won Le Mans seven times?
Jaguar is a British icon and an emotion which creates loyalty, as evidenced in over 160 million views of the rebrand on social media – with overwhelmingly negative comments. Consider this: Jaguar owners drive these cars although they are notoriously unreliable. They still drive it, simply because it’s a Jag.
Brands are valuable if they convincingly incorporate dimensions reflecting human cognition: time, place, personality, and emotion. The dimension of time is expressed in brand history and stories, place is where the product is ideated and/or made, personality can be expressed in the founding story and in the stories of brand ambassadors and prominent customers, and emotion can be expressed in tactile, olfactory, visual and auditory cues: in the case of a car, it’s the look of the car body, how the interior feels and smells, and the sound of the engine.
Many of these qualities align in historic Jaguars to create an integrated experience: the typical Jaguar roar of the engine, the sleek body suggesting a leaping Jaguar, the front badge with a roaring Jaguar, the fine leather interior. Jaguar also has an impressive heritage: a history of some 90 years, made in Great Britain and having been the car of choice of British TV legend Simon Templar, played by Roger Moore. The slogan “Copy Nothing” is a quote by Sir William Lyons, Jaguar’s founder, who said “a copy of nothing”.
The new campaign video is kept in dopamine colors and is made like a nineties music video. It’s retro with references to Warhol and Pop Art, the environment and fashion seems to reference a Hunger Games set.
Why would you pin your heritage brand to a campaign like that? We can gain some insight by looking at the situation of Jaguar in particular and the global car industry in general.
Jaguar is supposed to compete with some of the best in the business – Aston Martin, Ferrari, Porsche, Mecedes-Benz, BMW, all of which have lineups of cars you can buy right now. Jaguar however, having decided to become an EV-only company, has stopped making cars, and it won’t offer any until 2026. It is now a brand without a product.
At the same time, the global car industry is shifting fast. EV sales are since a while plummeting, yet EVs get better every year. China is now the world’s largest car market and at the same time the largest competitor for EVs. Chinese EV brands are innovating very fast and are deemed so dangerous for the EU car industry by the EU that it slapped tariffs up to 45% on Chinese EV imports.
In the last years, Jaguar was sticking to the comfort zone of its heritage, yet sales were dismal. The reason was not the brand, but their recent cars falling short of their competition, in terms of design, performance, quality and reliability.
Something had to be done. The new managing director of Jaguar explains: “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. We need to re-establish our brand and at a completely different price point so we need to act differently. We wanted to move away from traditional automotive stereotypes.”
The company says that is now targeting a different audience in the future – young luxury buyers. The assumption that in a year from now enough Gen Zs have the discretionary spending power for a car costing above 100,000 Pound Sterling plus find Jaguar more appealing than BMW, Porsche, Mecedes-Benz or Tesla seems quite optimistic.
Questioning conventions, breaking the mold and disrupting the market can be a good strategy, but you have to deliver something extraordinary for it to work. Apple is one example, with their legendary commercial of a hammer-throwing woman destroying a 1984 movie screen, followed by the first Mac computer. Another example of a product which breaks the mold is Tesla’s Cybertruck, a car which intentionally does not follow the bandwagon of common car designs with indents and curves trying to sugest dynamism. The Cybertruck design, edgy and angular, is very different from it’s competition and in the process elevated Tesla’s brand.
Lately, another iconic British heritage brand was brought close to the brink by failed attempts to appeal to a young audience, in the process eroding it’s brand equity and alienating it’s brand loyalists: Burberry.
After the storm of negative reactions to the Jaguar rebrand on social media, the managing director of Jaguar accused his potential customers of “vile hatred and intolerance” over the rebranding campaign. Many in social media are outraged that this was a “woke” rebrand. Well, if you connect a heritage brand to a contested issue, finding yourself in a controversy in return is quite predictable.
This is a time of crisis in the Western automotive industry – if it is Ford, Volkswagen or Stellantis, established Western car companies have to battle with high production costs, organisational inefficiencies and a strong competition from China.
Jaguar now has a long time ahead in which they have nothing to sell, while their competitors continue to develop and learn from their customers. A host of new Chinese EV brands such as NIO, BYD or GWM are working hard to establish their own brands in the minds of consumers. Some EV companies – Tesla in Germany and BYD in Hungary – are now also in the process of building brand new factories, thus avoiding protective EU tariffs.
Renewing a heritage brand is not an easy undertaking. The goal is to fill the brand with new life without disconnecting it from its identity and authenticity. This is a fine line where a profound understanding of the brand’s values, it’s customers and their expectations play a big role. It is just as important to realize where the actual problem of a company is – if it is the brand, it’s products or it’s current audience. Changing a brand is no panacea if the product doesn’t measure up. What brands do and how they do it is often misunderstood. Jaguar seems to be a case of what I call Projector Metaphor – more about it in my article here.
Following its rebrand, Jaguar has presented a prototype of their new car at Miami Design Week. Here is a short design analysis.
The large bonnet of the car is, according to the designer, referencing the long bonnet of the legendary Jaguar E-type. The long E-type bonnet however was primarily a functional choice – it needed this bonnet to accomodate its humongous 5.3 litre V12 engine. E-cars have small engines and its batteries are placed on the bottom of the car, so there is no functional reason for a long bonnet. The wheels and tyres of the 00 are large, but large and wide wheels are inefficient in terms of drag and thus not well suited to EVs.
How can that be explained? It seems the overall design of the Jaguar 00 is primarily led by referencing competition products: Rolls Royce, Cadillac, Mercedes-Maybach. The design works with the same semantics as other cars in this segment: long bonnets, low lying bodies and large wheels with graphical wheelcaps.
Also the front view of the Jaguar 00, while more angular, seems to reference the competition: the central area could be Rolls Royce’s characteristic grill, but with the strips turned around 90 degrees.
The design of the Jaguar 00 is situated within the semantic language of similar cars rather than embracing new design possibilities given within the technical context of EVs. The blocky shape makes it appear static, yet not regal such as the Rolls-Royce, and the promotion keywords “exuberant” and “vivid” seem more apt for cars of the competition – the Mercedes-Maybach Vision 6 or the Alfa Romeo Stradale 33, for instance. When considering a design language more suited to EVs, designs such as the Honda 0 concept or the Lotus Theory are more convincing.
Note how the place of origin and brand history is skillfully woven into these designs – there is an unmistakeable Italianità in the Alfa Romeo, Japanese tranquility in the Honda, British edginess in the Lotus, and French extravagance in the Bugatti.
The now historic Jaguar E was an exceptional car, sleek and elegant, and an instant success at its time. Brand, product and experience – seemingly effortlessly – created an integrated, convincing offering. The Jaguar 00 – both in comparison to its ancestors and its contemporary competition – is not that convincing, coming across as a preliminary design study rather than a fully developed product.
Jaguar sales fared badly in the last years, and it will not have a single product to sell for the next year. The only actual corporate value left was its heritage image and brand equity, and that was tainted with the recent campaign. No doubt, Jaguar management is finding itself on thin ice. In these difficult times for the car industry, can a design study and a controversial rebrand indeed turn into a convincing product on par with its competition, plus be paid for in sufficient quantities by a completely new customer segment, all of this after a year?
The owner of Jaguar is Jaguar Land Rover, part of Tata Motors which again is part of Tata Group, the largest Indian conglomerate with over a million employees. From an organisational standpoint, this campaign seems not to gel with the values of an Indian company as established as Tata. It could be result of an internal opinion bubble, an “echo chamber” in Jaguar’s British management team. From a strategic standpoint, this could be a breakout strategy and high stakes gamble, which could make sense when you find yourself economically as cornered as Jaguar. It could however also be a move to intentionally devalue the brand in the short term to make it easier for other car companies looking to take over a heritage brand. Whatever it is, we will know the outcome of this interesting story only after 2026.
Link to this article: https://mgstrategy.com/ideas/2024/11/24/jaguar-a-controversial-rebrand