Opinion: From brand to bland, what’s up with Jaguar’s new look?
Jaguar has taken a blow torch to its heritage as part of a relaunch. It makes Michel Hogan wonder why the car maker didn’t just start anew?
It’s easy to throw stones from the cheap seats. But organisations that take a blow torch to heritage as part of a relaunch make me wonder why they didn’t just start anew?
The venerable Jaguar is back in the news and courting controversy. Ditching its hugely recognisable leaping panther in favour of … I’m not sure how to describe the bland, abstracted, typographic moniker and generic catch phrases such as “delete ordinary”.
Seriously you can’t make this stuff up.
Managing director Rawdon Glover is quoted as saying: “We need to change people’s perceptions of what Jaguar stands for”. He continues: “and that’s not a straightforward, easy thing to do. So having a fire break in between old and new is, actually, very helpful”.
The firebreak he talks about happened when Jaguar halted all new car sales while it retooled for an all-EV future. Okay, so far so good. Changing what people buy if they aren’t buying what you have, is a necessary survival strategy. Why that required killing off 100 years of heritage is a head-scratcher.
I’m rarely an advocate of changing horses, or in this case, panthers, to try and reset how people see your business. After all, logos are how people pick you out of a lineup. So, when yours is globally recognised, and a store for the value accumulated by millions of people’s relationship with you, there better be a seriously good reason to change it wholesale.
Ironically, Jaguar says the new look is imaginative and bold. But it takes little of either to ditch the old in favour of a blank slate. Consider the missed opportunity of a newly invigorated panther stalking the ranks of EVs, seducing a new generation with sleek power – with value multiplied instead of eroded.
Every business, no matter the size, faces questions about how to move forward. And too often the lure of bright shiny things overtakes everything. Yes, markets change. Products come and go. What worked in 1990 won’t fit people’s expectations today.
Jaguar claims that people’s perception was anchored to the old and it needed to make room for the new. But there’s nothing stuck-in-the-past about appreciating the ways people feel connected to who you are and honouring that in what’s next.
Will Jaguar’s move be worth it? Time will tell. Famous to forgettable doesn’t feel like a good trade. But I’ve been wrong before. If the cars are good and generate enough buzz, the company might get the reset it wanted.
But it is just as likely that no one will know who they are anymore and turn to other luxury car companies that happily leverage their past into the future and put the value stored in their brand to work.
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