Jaguar’s rebranding: the price of electrification

Corporate rebranding is always a dangerous exercise. In some cases, people don’t care, such as when Opal Fruits became Starburst (although you can occasionally still get Opal Fruits at Poundland), Marathon became Snickers or Jif became Cif. However, Burberry took a misstep when they made a baseball cap in their distinctive check pattern, as this, and other offers, became part of the wardrobe of people described as “Chavs”, lowering the brand status, apparently temporarily, to the level of Kappa or Adidas. 

Anheuser-Busch made a commercially catastrophic misstep when the firm engaged a transwoman to promote Bud Light. Strongly denounced as transphobic for daring to criticise even the tiniest portion of the transgender movement’s advocacy, shoppers felt free to vote anonymously with their wallets and change their drinking habits. The fast food firm Subway promoted their offerings as an aid to dieting, extensively relying on a man who had lost considerable weight, while consuming their product in a manner that would have been provably harmful with McDonald’s, as the late Morgan Spurlock demonstrated (although his death was unrelated to fast food consumption). However Subway failed in its due diligence. Their new “spokesman” had a sideline in paedophilia to a criminal standard.

Then there’s the hazards of new logos. In the UK, the Office of Government Commerce decided that its new logo should be the letters “OGC”, arranged vertically and merged to form a single figure. Unfortunately, the resulting image also looked like a male stick-figure masturbating. It is not clear how this logo went through all the acceptance stages without anyone noticing. It is possible that the logo was the inspiration for this Armstrong and Miller sketch, that also lampooned the logo of the 2012 London Olympics here . Royal Mail, post-privatisation, decided a few years back to change its name to “Consignia”, for reasons that presumably made sense to everyone apart from the actual people who use its services. It quickly changed it back, following the inevitable backlash.

It is in this context of tectonic-level marketing shifts that the recent rebranding of Jaguar can be considered. Gone is anything resembling motoring tradition in the UK. In its place is a futuristic landscape, peopled by featureless lithe models, clad in brightly-coloured garments doing their best to behave like robots, which is not too difficult for them as the appearance of brushed steel androgynous figures devoid of humanity seems to be a default for them in their line of work. The logo has also been reshaped with ovoid lettering. The big cat has gone.

This image change has attracted a lot of criticism. And yet Jaguar’s only “crime” may be to be the first in its field.

The classic image of the “Jag” (and it has to be pronounced with a very long “a”), one that the firm is clearly strenuously trying to abandon, is probably best described by Farmer Jeremy Clarkson and his mates in this clip from Top Gear, made when it was required Sunday night viewing for all decent people:

“ The important question is “is it a proper Jag” is this car slightly caddish that’s what you actually mean is, is the person who drives it a bit, oh what’s the word I’m not quite sure how to sum it up but there sort of person who would go away for a weekend with his wife to a hotel some romantic place and spend the entire night flirting outrageously with a waitress and it’s okay because he’s got a Jag, that’s “Jaaag”. You can get away with anything I’m terribly sorry I ran over your dog oh in my Jaaag is it fair to say do you think that no Jaaag driver is ever entirely trustworthy but it’s in a really nice likeable way because if you went to a prison forget the sort of stabbers and the you know the stranglers, the ones who were in there for a bit of tax dodging . . . yeah but 80% have got Jaaags you know what I mean do you got a Jaaag who here’s got a Jaaag he’s a Jaaag driver . . . he goes away with a sort of girl for the weekend and then goes awfully sorry bit of an issue, with would you mind awfully settling this while I go and warm up the Jaaag? “

The image of a “Jaaag” driver in this context would be  Terry-Thomas in his prime.

It’s not as if Jaguar has not leaned into this image somewhat in its advertising in the UK and abroad, especially in the USA, playing up the fact that all the best Hollywood villains are British .

“ Have you ever noticed how in Hollywood movies all the villains are played by Brits? Maybe we just sound right. . . We’re more focused. . . More precise. . . We’re always one step ahead. . . With a certain style and eye for detail. . . And we’re obsessed by power. . . A stiff upper lip is key. . . And we all drive Jaguars. . . It’s good to be bad “.

So why the image change? The answer should be obvious. 

Electricity. 

The Jaguar brand is associated with powerful internal combustion engines, and the sound they make, as well as the distinctive aerodynamic styling. But the brand has to face a future where the internal combustion engine is consigned to history.

It’s a bit like the transition from steam trains to diesel and electric. Steam trains looked like living creatures, with their exposed cylinders, cranks, and drive rods functioning like a form of respiration making anthropomorphic visualisation easy, as the Rev W Awdry demonstrated here in print.

A throbbing petrol engine gives a high-performance car a kind of life compared to lesser, muffled, road vehicles. The association with a barely controllable beast on wheels is always part of the appeal of such top-end cars. To be able to control such a mechanical monster, suggests the advertising subliminally, is the mark of a man, and the chances of having an attractive woman being willing to sit in the passenger seat, and to reward such a car owner with her favours, is also promoted to the limits of legal regulation, certainly at car shows.

But we are now told that burning hydrocarbons to obtain motive force through the use of mechanical energy is to be soon forbidden. Yes, the hydrocarbons may be burned, but only in limited amounts and then at central locations. From there the motive force generated will immediately be converted into surging electrons, which will be used to alter the chemistry of a battery until they may be released to travel around an electric motor, delivering its motive force to tyres on a road, rather like the milk carts of old, but considerably faster and sleeker, and hopefully, more profitable.

So the car will soon cease to be a machine of mechanical complexity (crankshafts? timing belts? poppet valves?) that sometimes takes on the attributes of a living creature, like a big cat. Instead future cars will be more like IT appliances, such as a laser printer, but with even fewer emissions as they don’t use toner powder fused by heat to a paper’s surface. Where a laser printer has rubber-coated rollers to move the paper around its innards before expelling it, so an electric car has rubber wheels to move itself on a road surface. In both devices, the rolling parts are driven by an electric motor, governed by microprocessors, and can be connected to a computer. In this context, it should make sense that the branding for a car is converging on how Hewlett-Packard sells its wares in the IT sector, but with a bit more panache and also the soulless supermodels. The car-maker’s new logo now looks like it recognises it is becoming an IT company.

So Jaguar is renouncing its previous image, based on a growling hydrocarbon-burning engine resembling a wild beast. Petrolheads will no longer buy its products, but then its products will no longer run on petrol. 

For the last four decades or longer, consumers have been fed propaganda about how bad car emissions are for the environment. It has, however, taken this long for car companies to monetise this message effectively. They have been, er, driven, to do so by impending government regulation, but also the visible success of the Tesla brand over the years. Where General Motors failed in the late 1990s with its EV1 offer, so Elon Musk has prevailed in the 2020s, and his success has forced his competitors to follow, lest they be consigned to the history books, as horse-drawn cart manufacturers were a century ago — unless they adapted to new horseless technology that used petrol instead of hay and water.

The rebranding is not designed to sell cars to existing Jaguar aficionados, but to people who wish, or have no choice but, to use the new technology, and wish a own an established premium brand, in preference to the new musky upstart, as a way to define themselves to all-comers. It remains to be seen if the new Jaguars will be able to generate the excitement of an E-type. But if Jaguar manages to make an electric E-type, it may just might.

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