Jaguar has rebranded when it needed to revitalise

Oh fuck, Jaguar, what have you done?

I appreciate things have not been easy in recent years. That your once sparkling reputation has been tarnished by poor reliability and a garage full of often average cars. That you’ve been traded from one parent company to another with barely a thought for your brand. And that when you landed at Tata Motors you had to face the ignominy of being outshone by sister brand Land Rover. For every Jaguar sold last year they shifted six.

That ratio will disappear completely next year, when Jaguar stops producing or selling anything. For the next 12 months, perhaps longer, the company will make nothing but headlines. Three new EV models will eventually form Jaguar’s new line-up in 2026. Apparently, there is a prototype currently driving around various European roads in disguise. We will find out more in December when a vehicle is revealed at Miami Art Week.

That new car will sell for roughly double the price of current Jaguar vehicles and the company expects to retain only 10% to 15% of its current customer base. Jaguar will shift its targeting to younger, wealthier, more urban shoppers that the company describes as “design-minded” and “cash-rich, time-poor”. Hmm.

The new Jaguar cars will be positioned differently too. The brand wants to be seen as “exuberant”, “modernist”, “compelling”, and all about “fearless creativity”. And – in line with the original Jaguar mantra of its founder William Lyons – the cars will be “a copy of nothing”. The brand’s distinctive assets are also significantly changed for its EV future. Out go many of the original codes, to be replaced by two logos, a typeface, a graphic code called ‘strikethrough’ and a colour palette consisting of red, blue and yellow.

The company will also scale down to a much smaller number of dealers – around 20 in the UK – which will be supplemented by Jaguar’s own “curated brand stores” with the first opening in Paris at some point in 2025. Each dealership will display high-end art alongside fancy cuisine.

‘Bizarre’ brand overhaul

The company has a new visual campaign which, in lieu of any cars, features an array of fearfully creative looking people doing their best Blue Steel. I was looking forward to my first glimpse of this new Jaguar future. I own a Land Rover and have always fancied a Jag. But when the ad started, I confess that I laughed out loud. Not from joy or appreciation for the boldness of the new vision. But from the sheer fucking lunacy of the whole thing. When the 30-second film ended, I sat there for the longest time trying to get my head around what I’d just seen.

That might sound like I was stunned into a luxurious rapture. I’ve had those feelings before. At a dinner for Moët et Chandon. At a tournament with Hublot. Watching a man from Hennessy make a barrel at 5am from water, wood and fire. But that was not what I was feeling. What I was feeling was that this was possibly the most stupid marketing thing I’d seen, and – trust me, reader – I’ve seen a Rutger Hauer amount of shit in my time.

And I am not alone in my head scratching. Nine million views on X stirred up some of the most negative brand vitriol in recent history. “Do you sell cars?” was Elon Musk’s cutting four-word reaction. “Is this the car company Jaguar?” was another confused query. One plaintive comment simply consisted of an image of an E-Type in British racing green with the words “what you once were” underneath it. These comments were being playfully answered by Jaguar’s PR team, whose banal responses only served to make the whole thing more cringeworthy.

The assorted auto journalists attending Jaguar’s media launch this week weren’t impressed either. In one particularly bruising review, James Baggott from Car Dealer described the launch event as a “drunken dream”, “incredibly bizarre”, and akin to being trapped inside a cult for the afternoon.

Starbucks needs to cut the crap from its brand positioning

The well-respected Gerry McGovern, the chief creative officer in charge of all of this, deserves quite a lot of slack. His work with Land Rover has been exemplary. And given ‘product’ is the most important of the four Ps, we should wait until a new Jag appears next month before rushing to judgement. I’ve bought a couple of Porsches despite thinking almost all their ads were stupid. And it’s especially hard for Jaguar, given it is currently a car brand without any cars. But maybe a longer advertising hiatus might have served the brand better than a person in an orange gimp suit holding a neon hammer.

If I were a younger, less experienced marketer, I would sit back and assume I was missing something and only later realise it had been pants from the start. But I am old and wizened from so much other marketing madness that I know the smell of imminent brand immolation when I whiff it. And the fumes are unmistakable.

Respect heritage

There was a distinct whiff every time CEO Adrian Mardell used the L-word this week, for example. “In 2021,” he told the assembled journalists at the media launch “a strategy was born to elevate our brand in a world of luxury.” But the one rule of luxury brands is that they don’t talk about the L thing to consumers. Twenty-pound bracelet brands do, but you won’t catch Hermès doing it except with a tongue firmly in its French joue.

If Jaguar wants to be a proper luxury brand, it needs to stop worrying about what generic luxury is and simply learn to be very specifically itself. And that means starting out with a clear respect and appreciation for its heritage. Make no mistake, Jaguar was once a great luxury brand, better and more prestigious than Aston Martin. And it can get back to that place. But it won’t get there with the current corporate attitude of completely “resetting” the brand and starting afresh.

Yes, Jaguar is shifting to electric rather than petrol powertrains. But the DNA of the brand and its codes don’t change because of this. When Hennessy moved from barrels to bottle (just as seismic a move back in the day) the brand kept its signature style and position. Indeed, in times of great product change, you want to play up these established markers all the more. That’s also a crucial conceit when 101 soulless Asian EV startups attack your market with new ideas, different competencies and lower manufacturing costs. Your heritage is a 90-year old competitive advantage. You walk away from it at your peril.

If Jaguar wants to be a proper luxury brand, it needs to stop worrying about what generic luxury is and simply learn to be very specifically itself.

Every luxury brand needs to revitalise itself. Any brand over the age of 50 does. And the EV revolution forces a car brand to reinterpret itself urgently for a new modernity. But brand revitalisation is very different from rebranding. The Jaguar team are changing what Jaguar stands for and how it presents itself. They aim to be radical. To shock. To do it differently from before. It’s too much, and way past the sweet spot of proper brand revitalisation, which combines a respect for history and desire for modernity. Jaguar should have gone back to the glory days of this great brand and asked what that looked like for 2025 with an electric engine. Whatever the answer to that tricky question might be, it isn’t colourful but disconnected fashion models exiting a yellow elevator on planet Uranus.

The positioning Jaguar has adopted also seems overblown, curiously disconnected from automotive customers and almost entirely filled with bollocks. In the great days of Jaguar, the brand was defined as ‘Grace, Space, Pace’. That’s still a car I want to buy. A big cat in a small cage. Especially if it’s British, and even better with a 2025 electric drivetrain. But who wants to buy a car that is “exuberant”, “modernist” and “fearlessly creative”. I’m driving to Tesco to pick up my groceries, not hosting a birthday party for Basquiat. Jaguar has mistaken its internal project notes for the very different challenge of positioning a great brand to consumers. Show me a consumer looking to buy an “exuberant” motor vehicle and I’ll show you an AI-generated picture of a six fingered supermodel that turns into a horse.

The appeal of origin

We should underline Britishness too. In all the talk of Miami Art Shows and Paris boutiques, the team should have reasserted that Jaguar is a very British brand. I say that not to be jingoistic, but commercial. The paradox of being global is that you need to push your British origins to get there. I have several car-loving German friends who begrudgingly admit that a great British car is something they long for more than any other. There is a certain slice of the American car-buying populace that hankers for a British-made vehicle. I know, and you know, that this does not make any sense. But it’s a market truth. And it is a massive opportunity for Jaguar.

But among all the marketing arse that Jaguar has “curated” about modernism and creativity, how about something about being British? Not clichéd, plastic-flag, fish-and-chips British. Proper British. Stella McCartney, Jude Bellingham, Ed Sheeran British. It’s what they want out there beyond these shores, so why not sell it to them in automotive form? In the media release for ‘Jaguar, Reimagined’, creativity was mentioned nine times, the B word not once. That’s a mistake. Luxury is not about opening your first store in Paris, it’s about remembering your micro-origins and doing it you-know-where.

The team should have reasserted that Jaguar is a very British brand.

And what about that new Jaguar target consumer? It again makes little sense. All these beautiful young people look great in ads but none of them have enough fucking money to buy a decent car. Besides, the modern world of marketing has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. No one has a target segment for their brand anymore. Ehrenberg-Bass won that war. Everyone now accepts we aim the brand at everyone for ‘the long of it’. That we don’t alienate anybody. And that only later, with the brand salient and known far and wide for a handful of things, we shift to product activation, ‘the short of it’ and targeting the 5% who are currently in the market for a new car. That’s the time to zoom in on target segments – but far more prosaic and practical ones than the clearly fictional young, beautiful, rich people that Jaguar has invented.

And, while it’s a throwaway line that Jaguar expects to lose 85% to 90% of existing buyers, it is also commercially stupid. These are the people most likely to want an EV version of a brand they already buy into. They also are going to keep driving their Jaguars for many years to come. Drivetrains might have changed, but the old automotive logic that your existing drivers are your biggest touchpoint has not. Update the brand by all means but encourage everyone – especially existing owners – to jump on board. I know a lot of them are uncool, dress badly and have zero sexy friends, but in luxury, you quickly learn to separate the client we show in comms from the one we make money from.

‘Luxury’ opportunity lost

Going from selling no cars in 2025 to mass production by 2026 is another error. Every proper luxury brand loves a bit of scarcity. And from it, the tiniest slice of availability. Couture revels in having under 100 clients. Ferrari adores estimating how many people will buy its next model and making significantly fewer cars than that demand would necessitate. Dom Pérignon makes branding hay in the years when it makes no wine. My point is that this was the time when Jaguar could have been properly luxurious and then started its new journey with a handful of perfect, handmade EVs that generated huge coverage, massive demand and perfect brand desire. ‘Privazione’, as they say at Gucci. Which means ‘the fuckers want it because they cannot have it’ in Italian. Jaguar will go from nothing to mass and that is a miss.

Of course, no one at Jaguar is listening. Any initial criticism is only going to fuel the fire of this marketing bonfire. They want to be radical. They are hoping for pushback and alienation from existing customers. Someone has foolishly advised them that this is exactly what the brand needs. That luxury brands need to piss people off and create angst. The torrent of abuse that their new marketing spurred this week is not a concern, it’s probably being seen as a positive by the team. Only later will the horror of the situation become apparent. For now, the advantage of having no cars to sell is that there are no sales targets to meet.

But let’s be optimistic. It may not read like it, but I want Jaguar to win. Let’s hope the cars are amazing and they quickly extinguish the nasty initial smell that this early marketing is generating. All will be forgotten if Jaguar creates a modern electric world- beater. An E-Type for a new century. I just hope that, unlike the pre-launch campaign, any future marketing retains a stronger link back to the DNA of its petrol-burning forebears. Because, while Jaguar needs to update itself, it also needs to be itself too.

Jaguar was always meant to be a “copy of nothing”. But maybe somebody should have added the postscript “except itself” for clarity.

Mark Ritson was voted the British Society of Magazine Editors Columnist of the Year last night in London. He has won the award on three previous occasions and is also five times winner of the PPA Columnist of the year award. He is a former marketing professor and founder of the Mini MBA in Brand Management, which teaches, among many other things, the art of brand revitalisation.