Should Jaguar have erased its history with its rebrand? | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

The headlines, particularly in the right wing press have been gruesome, the Daily Mail branding it a ‘disastrous woke rebrand’ while the Telegraph describes the video – unkindly but not, I am afraid, unfairly – as ‘widely ridiculed.’

If you’ve not seen it, it’s worth a look, not least because it’s a video from a car company that neither features, nor mentions, cars. Whether you like it or not, you’ll not struggle to see why so many have queued up to chuck rocks at it. If you imagine the kind of video Jaguar might make, perhaps full of images from its rich heritage, the one the company actually produced is pretty much the complete opposite.

It is not the kind of promotional video I would produce for a company like Jaguar, putting it mildly; then again, it’s not as if anyone’s asking. And perhaps its detractors are missing its point entirely. By being provocative in this way, by raising the hackles of diehard traditionalists in Fleet Street and elsewhere, what the film has achieved is a level of brand exposure Jaguar has not seen in years.

This, you will recall, comes at a time when Jaguar has taken the unprecedented step of becoming a car company that doesn’t make cars. It sounds ridiculous, but the thinking is that the ‘new’ Jaguar when it arrives around two years from now will be such a departure from any production car the company has made before that a total break from the past was required both to put clear air between Jaguar’s past and its future and provide the time for anticipation to build to a frenzied peak. Or at least that’s what they’ll be hoping for. It’s an approach that is not without its pitfalls as, I imagine, any dealer relying on Jaguar sales for part of his or her livelihood would be all too happy to tell you.

But the point is this: Jaguar is simply not in a position to take a ‘steady as she goes’ approach, and you can debate all day long how and why it allowed itself to get into that situation. It would be of particular interest to learn why the all new XJ and J-Pace – which would still be fresh faces in the marketplace – got canned at a cost of who-knows-how-many-millions or billions at a stage where both were close to being fully developed. But now it’s an issue of only academic issue for, rightly or wrongly, Jaguar is where it is and no amount of retrospective wailing and gnashing of teeth is going change that. 

Jaguar has one shot at this and finds itself in the surely unique position of not having to worry about customers turning away from its cars and sales falling off a cliff, because in this case there are no sales and therefore no cliff.

So allow me to paint a picture: Jaguar now finds itself in a position where for the first time in decades it has become one of the most talked about car brands on the planet. Next month, on December 2^nd, it reveals its new concept car and let’s just imagine for now that it’s nothing like as bad as many are now fearing. What if, whisper it, it’s actually pretty good. Well then the campaign will have not only got Jaguar back to the top of the agenda, but then shown a car so much better than people expected, that the collective sigh of relief the concept then gets means an even better reception that it might otherwise have earned. And now everyone is still talking about Jaguar, but this time for all the right reasons.

It's not impossible. Later the same day that the video was released, Jaguar posted an image of what we are told is part of the ‘Design Vision Concept’ we’ll see next month. Even from that it seems clear that the car is going to be striking and probably quite exceptionally so. To call it ‘bold’ is to put it quite mildly.

So we must all hope it does the trick and that the current wave of EV scepticism has long since been swept back out to sea before sales of the new Jaguar begin. Because make no mistake: this is a high stakes game with what I believe is now not choice between this Jaguar or that Jaguar, but this Jaguar or no Jaguar at all.