Home / Jaguar, you ok hun? x
Us humans are often resistant to change – and that means rebrands are often polarising. It’s natural to feel a little uneasy when higher-ups in suits start messing with a brand you know and love but, for the most part, we come around to the idea of fresh logos, straplines and colours eventually. Before we know it, the ‘rebrand’ is just the brand: we get used to a company’s new look and realise we have more important things to worry about.
The fact that rebrands often divide opinion is no accident. They’re meant to shake things up and get people talking. They’re supposed to herald the arrival of a new era and make a statement. They remind us that the brand in question isn’t standing still or looking to the past, it’s looking ahead to a brighter future.
It’s worrying, then, that Jaguar’s latest rebrand doesn’t seem to be dividing opinion at all. If social media is anything to go by, those who hate the new look dramatically outnumber those who like it (or are indifferent to it). Rebrands are often intended to be polarising, but they’re not meant to cause people’s blood pressure to spike.
That’s the internet after all: if you fuck things up as badly as Jaguar just has, you’re going to get roasted.
The thing is, I don’t want to roast Jaguar. As a lifelong petrolhead (and a Brit), I want to see Jaguar get the success it deserves, and I hope I’m wrong about all of this. I’d love to look back on this article in five years’ time and marvel at how far off the mark my analysis was.
Who knows, maybe Jaguar has pulled off one of the single greatest marketing masterstrokes of all time. Maybe this negative reaction was all a part of their plan to achieve world domination. Maybe we’ll all be driving around in Jaguars in a decade’s time. Maybe. Hopefully.
Godspeed Jaguar!
We’re not exaggerating here: people are mad. On X, Jaguar’s first post revealing its new branding has (at the time of writing) attracted 151 million views and just 26,000 likes. There are 113,000 comments however, the most-liked being Elon Musk’s: “Do you sell cars?” That comment alone has received 326,000 likes, more than 10 times the amount Jaguar’s post has.
Jag has been ratioed hard.
It’s easy to just poke fun at Jaguar’s rebrand announcement. But instead of kicking the car maker while it’s down, we’re going to look at the reasons behind the negative reaction in more detail. What has got us all so riled up?
Let’s get this out of the way right from the off: the video Jaguar used to unveil its rebrand was a tough watch. The new logo is questionable, sure, but the pretentious, nonsensical, Teletubbies-esque reveal video is downright indefensible. What has it got to do with Jaguar? What has it got to do with cars? Why is everyone wearing silly costumes? It’s cursed.
When I first watched the video, I thought it was a joke. I thought a message would pop up in the last few seconds saying, “Don’t worry, we’re still Jaguar. We had you worried for a second, didn’t we?” But no. They were serious. To me, that video looked like something you’d see in the GTA universe – a spoof ad campaign for a made-up fashion brand that is intended to be comical and cliché.
Then there’s the text that appears throughout the video. ‘Break moulds’, Jag says. ‘Create exuberant’. ‘Delete ordinary’. It’s all just nonsense. They’re trying so hard to ‘make a statement’ that they’ve actually managed to tell us nothing at all.
The bullshittery showcased in the reveal video is jarring in isolation, but even more so when you consider Jaguar’s long and illustrious heritage. It’s hard to see a brand that was once so admired and respected resort to undignified shock tactics to get noticed.
Jaguars of old were refined, elegant and technologically advanced. They spoke for themselves. XK120, E-Type, D-Type, XJ220… if you know anything about cars, you’ll know the significance of these names – and how they managed to fuse beautiful design with record-breaking performance in a way that most other car manufacturers could only dream of doing.
Jaguar has a remarkable history, so why does the company seemingly want to distance itself from it? You can look ahead and push the boundaries without trying to erase everything that’s gone before. Just look at German brands like Porsche and BMW, who actively celebrate their older models on social media as a reminder of how far they’ve come.
Jaguar, by contrast, has deleted or privated all of its old social posts from before the rebrand announcement, which feels like a middle finger to long-term fans of the marque.
It turns out that this ‘middle finger’ extends beyond social media: the rebrand is part of a wider repositioning strategy which will see Jaguar, in effect, deserting its current customer base. We’re not joking. Over the next year or so, its UK dealer network will shrink from 80 to 20, and instead of targeting older, affluent customers, it will shift its focus to younger, ‘design-minded’ customers who are ‘cash-rich and time-poor’.
Jaguar expects to retain just 10% to 15% of its current customer base, which seems like corporate suicide for a brand that’s already struggling to shift cars. It feels like a last gasp – a Hail Mary attempt to salvage what’s left of an iconic name. It could turn out to be a genius move but, right now, it seems more like they’re driving nails into their own coffin.
There was nothing ‘wrong’ with the old branding: the products were the issue. Jaguar customers didn’t start defecting to German, Japanese and even South Korean brands because they didn’t like the idea of having a Jaguar sat on the driveway: they switched because they didn’t think the cars were up to scratch.
Although they went through a bit of a design rough patch in the early 2000s (S-Type and X-Type, we’re looking at you), Jaguars have always been attractive cars for the most part. They’ve always been luxurious and well-appointed and, most of the time, they can match their rivals when it comes to performance. But for a long time now, they’ve consistently fallen behind the competition when it comes to build quality and reliability.
Spend just a few minutes researching this and you’ll see that Jaguar performs poorly on practically every reliability survey out there, not just in the UK but globally. Combine this with headline-grabbing stories of runaway I-Paces and nightmarish dealership experiences, and it’s easy to see why once-loyal Jaguar customers have jumped ship over the years.
People want to buy Jaguars – they’re desirable cars. They just can’t justify it when they’re not on par with their rivals, and no amount of rebranding and repositioning is going to fix that.
It’s no secret that Jaguar is in a spot of bother. Although global sales for the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) Group rose by 20% over the last year, it’s Land Rover that has been doing the heavy lifting and keeping the company in the green. Over the last few years, Land Rover has generated roughly 80% of the group’s annual sales. Shouldn’t the split be closer to 50-50?
To make matters worse, Jaguar has now pulled all of its existing range from production and halted sales entirely until the new model range surfaces in 2026. You know things are rough when a car maker isn’t actually making any cars.
What Jaguar needs right now is to reignite sales with a lineup of new cars that can properly take the fight to brands like BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz – so it’s good that a range of all-new models is on the way. But we could have done without a bizarre fashion video and a logo that would look more at home on a washing machine than a luxury car.
I’m sure Jaguar has its reasons for doing this. After all, only those working within the company know what’s really going on and what’s planned for the next few years. The problem is, they haven’t done a good enough job of communicating their vision to the wider public. They’ve been far too abstract and far too vague, which is partly why we’ve all been left scratching our heads.
Yes, the rebrand is a bit weird. There’s no getting away from it. But maybe, just maybe, if Jaguar had explained the reasoning behind the new look a bit better, people might not have reacted so negatively. Whether you approve of a particular rebranding exercise or not, you shouldn’t ever be left wondering why the company has done it: the intent should be clear from the outset.
Then, there’s the whole brand repositioning aspect to consider. Why is Jaguar now targeting these so-called ‘cash-rich, time-poor’ customers? Surely if someone was cash-rich but time-poor, they’d just take the easy route, save themselves the hassle and buy another German car? The whole thing just doesn’t seem to add up, no matter which way you look at it.
There’s a lot of people out there with strong opinions on this, but many of them wouldn’t bat an eyelid if Jaguar went bust tomorrow. To them, Jaguar right now is just a laughing stock – an easy target to make fun of and make memes about.
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