The hottest topic this week among marketing people and the adland was the announced re-branding of the luxury car maker Jaguar. They pivot from a very traditional top notch segment car manufacturer to a Gen-Z, woke-ish electric vehicle only brand. Even the iconic jumping cat symbol has been removed.
In the announcement they themselves stressed the new radical positioning as “copy nothing”:
The (overly negative) reactions
Like always when a radical change happens, people go wild and crazy about it. This time, not in a good way. I really spent some time searching around the internet, but I couldn’t really find positive comments (except from the Jaguar team themselves) on the move. The comments range from “killing their brand” to “are they even selling cars?” from Elon Musk himself.
Mark Ritson emphasized in his comment the lost British heritage of this iconic var brand and called the re-branding a “bizarre” move.
My take
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.
- Jaguar’s transformation follows common pattern we seen among big brands recently: stripped serifs, minimalist typography, expanded color palette, fashion-forward visuals. All optimized for platform visibility rather than brand distinction. The same way luxury fashion brands and many other premium car brands have realized before. While perusing the goal to be different, they ironically end up in the opposite position in becoming more alike.
- Jaguar had an iconic logo, which also had a particularly strong impact. This strong brand asset was simply killed off without need.
- Jaguar went woke-ness and diversity all-in. But the way it was presented just seems very artificial in my opinion. The main thing is that all age groups, genders and skin colors are represented and staged in the announcement video. Like someone used a checkbox for each micro-segment they want to target.
Also from an economical standpoint that they decided to not sell a single car in 2025, to fill the delivery pipeline of the new EVs for 2026, is not a smart decision. Being not in the game for so long, will it make very difficult to re-join with a completely new look. Marketing world is spinning fast and even faster in a segment like EVs at the moment.
Going broke? We will see…
Summarizing all the comments I have read in the last few days, I can only assume that at least the marketing world thinks, that Jaguar has no bright future and they just made a really terrible mistake. What really matters is how the consumers at scale will respond in a mid-term time frame. Despite all the expertise and experience that final answer is given by them in sitting in a Jaguar without the jumping cat at the front of the hood. Their customer base will probably change significantly to the existing one, but this was exactly the intention of this bold move.
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