The Jaguar Rebrand: A Tale of Corporations Chasing Trends Too Late
Jaguar’s recent rebrand is a classic case of a slow-moving institution attempting to capture a momentary cultural trend—and failing spectacularly.
Opinion of the rebrand’s overall design or aesthetic aside, this is really a cautionary tale of what happens when bloated bureaucracies try to engage in trend-chasing. It’s also a comment on how long-lasting, iconic brands need to stop reinventing the wheel and understand that their heritage is their greatest asset, particularly in an age of nostalgia and retrospect, like we are all currently living in.
A Trend Already Passed
My first impression of Jaguar’s rebrand was that it felt like an urban fashion brand from 2018-2019. Those were the years when I was personally well entrenched in the marketing teams of such brands, so I got a good feel for that moment first hand. Think sleek, overly manicured, and abstractly avant garde. That style palette undoubtedly had its moment, but I don’t think anyone, even at the time, would have called it “timeless”.
After doing some digging, I realized that my initial, gut reaction to Jaguar’s rebrand actually made a lot of sense when you consider the context.
As a part of JLR (Jaguar Land Rover), a massive company with over 40,000 employees who is, in turn, owned by the >1,000,000 person Tata Group, Jaguar’s decision-making process is undoubtably slow. In bloated organizations like this, every decision has layers of approval, reapproval, and committees about committees leaving any creative vision outdated by the time it’s executed (it’s very hard to steer large ships).
A History of Missteps
Jaguar has had a rough go of it the last 5 years. The company hasn’t introduced a new product line during that time, and has seen its sales plummet more 70%. This all comes down to a set of poor strategic decisions (please make a mental note of the theme emerging).
In an attempt to capture a broader market (for some reason), Jaguar tried to pivot from luxury to the upper-middle market. However, this strategy backfired for two reasons:
Cannibalization by Land Rover: As Jaguar’s sister brand, Land Rover already dominated the upper-middle market, leaving Jaguar to effectively fight against itself.
Loss of Luxury Identity: In the luxury market, where brand equity might as well be 90% of a business’s leverage, consumers no longer associated Jaguar with aspiration.
By attempting to cater to a broader audience, Jaguar alienated its core audience without winning over a new one. This misstep gutted Jaguar’s brand identity, leaving it caught in a no-man’s-land—too accessible for the luxury market but not compelling enough for the middle market.
Bureaucracy Meets Trend-Chasing
Given the timeline we just outlined, it’s pretty likely that the seeds of this rebrand were planted before the Covid era. Give me some rope here, but from what I can tell, sometime in 2018 or 2019, a marketing executive or brand agency likely pitched this new, ‘trendy’ direction as a way to revitalize sales and reposition the brand within the middle-market’s younger demo.
Here’s the thing about trends though: they move fast. To capitalize on a cultural moment, you have to act immediately (which is why small, scrappy startups are almost always better at doing it). Unfortunately, Jaguar’s bloated bureaucracy coupled with the fact that a car company has a shitload more (literal) moving pieces to pivot, meant that by the time the rebrand was executed (ie. yesterday), the trend had long since passed.
“But Jack, why didn’t they just change course once they realized the moment had passed?”
In addition to big companies just being hard to steer (as mentioned before), this actually highlight a bigger, fundamental problem with many large corporations: once a direction is (finally) set and tens of millions of dollars are spent, no employee wants to be the one to stick their head up halfway through and call out the fact that, "Hey, we missed the boat and this is probably a really fucking bad idea."
A classic case of group-think and a lack of incentive for employees sharing critical ideas.
The Tragedy of Abandoning Heritage
What makes this rebrand particularly heartbreaking is that Jaguar once had one of the most memorable and timeless brands in the automotive industry. For literally 100 years, that darned cat logo and its association with sleek, fast luxury vehicles defined everything from the golden age of Hollywood to the country estates of members of British Parliament.
Instead of cocooning up for a year or two after their middle-market misadventure and emerging with a renewed commitment to their luxury, well engineered heritage, Jaguar chose to chase a trend without any thought to longevity, effectively discarded a century of built up brand equity.
They could have doubled down on what made them iconic, tapping into the much longer-tail and sustainable societal movement toward nostalgia and retrospect.
But no, they tried to be something they’re not—and now, they’re left with neither heritage nor relevance.
Lessons for Marketers
I think it goes without saying that Jaguar’s rebrand is a good reminder of the risks of trend-chasing, particularly for legacy brands:
Act Fast or Not at All: Trends are fleeting. If your organization is too calcified to capitalize on them right away, it’s better to just ignore them.
Know Your Core Identity: Good music doesn’t need to speak to everyone, and a strong brand doesn’t need to tackle every trend. Evolution is good as long as it stays true to the seed that started it.
Challenge the Status Quo: Large organizations need to actively build incentives that encourage employees to ask, “Are we sure this is the right move?” The ‘sunk-costs’ fallacy is a fallacy for a reason, and the cost of sticking with a bad idea often outweighs the cost of pivoting, even when it hurts.
Jaguar’s mistake was abandoning its heritage to fit a mold it didn’t belong to.
TL;DR
Jaguar’s rebrand looks like it belongs in 2018-2019 because that’s likely when the process started. I bet the treatment for the infamous, pink-background announcement ad was even written at least 18 months ago.
The black-pill here is that Jaguar, a brand specifically built on timelessness, has become the “New Coke” cautionary tale of chasing the fleeting.
It’s also worth noting the irony of their new slogan “Copy Nothing” being combined with imagery directly copied from fashion brands half a decade ago.
What the heck is the new car going to look like?
