Opinion: You don’t actually care about the Jaguar rebrand
Critics of luxury carmaker Jaguar’s rebrand are more concerned by imaginary ‘wokeism’ than its survival as a business, writes David Adams.
Poor Jaguar.
After launching a controversial rebrand, the storied carmaker has earned a chorus of detractors.
Even worse, the loudest critics — those noble defenders of Jaguar’s heritage, who say the new-look logo and identity erase its history — don’t seem to care about the company at all.
If Jaguar abandons the rebrand, it will be a capitulation to ‘fans’ arguing in bad faith.
More broadly, it will set a poor example for corporate leaders who must abandon nostalgia to ensure the future of their businesses.
Jaguar last week refreshed its logo and brand presence, doing away with the leaping big cat in favour of curvy typography and new credos: “Copy nothing. Delete ordinary”.
The brand showcased the new look in a video teaser, which features a handful of fashionistas, a great splash of colour, and precisely zero cars.
It was a clear break for a brand with a rich racing heritage, which has produced models as graceful as the E-type and as excessive as the XJ220.
The reception was fierce.
In the days since, you may have noticed parodies in your news feed, handwringing from brand consultants on LinkedIn, and even the odd spot on Sky News Australia, each catastrophising about what this means for Jaguar’s legacy.
If you look closer, however, you will see most complaints have as much to do with cars as the ad itself.
Rather, the softening of its typeface, the pops of colour, and yes, racially diverse actors, have set off the ‘woke’ detectors.
The ad has garnered more than 2.1 million YouTube views in a week, and thousands of comments, with many of the top responses fuming about pronouns and DEI.
Call it a vibe shift. Say the re-election of Donald Trump has emboldened social conservatives to share their views online.
Regardless, it is clear the Jaguar rebrand has become a vector for negative sentiment that has little reverence for the brand itself.
I don’t think they actually care about Jaguar, and it’s cynical to claim they do.
(It is also cynical to think a diverse ad cast indicates real corporate conscience, but that might be too fine a point to express in this instance).
Quite simply, if people felt as strongly about Jaguar as they say they do, they’d buy more Jaguars.
Today’s Jaguar sales trail those of its main European competitors.
If reverence for Jaguar as a brand was really so profound, it stands to reason that more car buyers would opt for an F-TYPE over a Porsche 911, or an XF sedan over a Mercedes E-class.
And of the six Jaguar models available in Australia today, five were discontinued this year.
That includes a cluster of SUVs, sedans, and the F-TYPE itself, Jaguar’s last sports coupé and the closest living relative to the E-type of old.
Despite warm reviews from those who actually drove them, Jaguar made little, if anything, from those models.
“None of those are vehicles on which we made any money, so we are replacing them with new vehicles on newly designed architectures,” Adrian Mardell, chief executive of parent company Jaguar Land Rover, told investors earlier this year.
It is clear the rebrand follows Jaguar’s push for financial stability, not the other way around.
Now Jaguar is committing itself to being fully electric in 2025 — a bold declaration for a performance car brand, but one that makes sense, given the trajectory of the internal combustion engine.
There are fair questions to ask about Jaguar’s new ad, and its appeals to younger car buyers.
Will Jaguar really be able to convince motorists in their 20s and 30s to shell out for a luxury EV?
To even reach that point, however, is to assume Jaguar genuinely wants to sell real cars to real people.
Critics of the new corporate identity don’t seem willing to admit that possibility.
It is as if Jaguar can only be one thing: blokey, brawny performance, preferably delivered by a V12 and manual transmission.
To them, it seems like repositioning the brand — even if it could ensure Jaguar’s survival in a rapidly changing automotive environment — might be worse than letting it die.
Jaguar now has a tough choice.
Either it walks away from its new brand identity, setting millions of pounds on fire in the process, and submits to the poison of nostalgia by affixing its old leaping cat logo to a new fleet of EVs.
Or it actually lives up to its ‘Delete ordinary’ branding, sloughing off the opinions of anti-woke activists who weren’t going to buy one of its modern cars anyway.
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