Few branding stories this year have created more column inches, fevered speculation or downright condemnation as Jaguar’s eye-opening rebrand and accompanying launch campaign. In the days leading up to the launch of Jaguar’s new 00 Type model at the Miami Art Fair in early December, our Regional COO, Graham Hitchmough, shared his thoughts on the rebrand with Marketing Interactive. Below is the full versions of that piece.
Any significant change of direction for a revered brand is likely to put some noses out of joint. But Jaguar’s jarring new look seems to be willfully courting controversy.
Jaguar’s business model and product strategy is changing dramatically to keep pace with the industry’s transition to EVs and compete effectively for a new generation of luxury car buyers. In that sense, a jolt to the brand’s core visual motifs is justified. The newly developed ‘device mark’ and Jaguar ‘leaper’ will not find favour with existing Jaguar fans or traditionalists, but that’s kind of the point. While a through-line to the heritage of the brand is no doubt important, these ‘symbols of change’ are primarily there to signal where the brand is heading, rather than where it has come from. For a business that must adapt quickly to stay relevant, that may be no bad thing.
The brand symbols may seem over-designed, and the language used by Jaguar to introduce them is definitely overwrought, but after a slew of anodyne logo updates from the auto sector, too much rather than too little makes a refreshing change. And, as always, the full picture will only be revealed once we see how these assets are deployed, across communication and on the vehicles themselves.
The element of the relaunch that has received the most online condemnation
and which appears to be least explicable is the launch film. The absence of an actual car can be forgiven by the fact that this is effectively a teaser for the main product reveal at Miami Art Week in December, and it’s a sad sign of the times that the use of a diverse cast triggers a knee-jerk response from the ‘anti-wokeism’ brigade.
But, for a brand claiming to ‘copy nothing’ and ‘break moulds’, the imagery of the film seems entirely derivative. With its sci-fi sets and vivid over-the-top styling, it comes across like a Luc Besson fever-dream. If this is the future that Jaguar is driving towards, then it seems neither original nor inspirational. The concept of ‘exuberant modernism’ that the film seeks to embody feels like an internal design brief rather than a brand manifesto that’s likely to turn heads and clock up test-drives.
It may be that the full launch in Miami will reveal more mischief than madness in Jaguar’s approach. Either the brand really is ‘breaking moulds’ with a scorched earth policy to jettison legacy loyalists in favour of an imagined new avant-garde audience, or it is strategically dialling up the ‘artsy’ angle for all its worth to stoke media interest and create buzz around a new brand and product that will ultimately prove to be far more palatable.