I Look At Jaguar's Failed Rebrand, And Think This Is How It Could Have Been Done Far Better

I’ve spent much of my life either learning about marketing, working in marketing organizations, or advising on marketing. My first three degrees were in Merchandising, which is block and tackle marketing, old school. Unless you live under a rock, you’ve seen Jaguar’s attempt to rebrand themselves and that it is going very, very, very badly. 

It fascinates and frustrates me that many CMOs don’t understand how branding works and thus make avoidable mistakes. While Jaguar is hardly alone this year about branding screw-ups, theirs was particularly egregious.

Let’s talk about why they felt they needed to change their brand’s attributes, what they did wrong, and how this could have been done much better. 

Jaguar’s Customers Are Aging Out

Like Apple or worse, Jaguar had a major problem: its customer base was trending older, and younger buyers weren’t considering Jaguars viable. This means Jaguar, on its prior path, was in the process of having its customer base die off. Thus, they felt the need to refresh the brand and focus it on a younger audience.

This meant they needed to revitalize and align their brand with younger buyers. However, this faced several problems that needed to be addressed. One is that younger buyers are turning away from car ownership in general, and inflation, coupled with very high interest rates, has been pricing regular cars, let alone luxury cars, out of younger buyers' budgets. 

Finally, Jaguar's survival depended on its ability to attract younger buyers and retain existing buyers during the pivot. In both cases, Jaguar appears to have failed. 

What Jaguar Did Wrong

Attracting a different demographic to create a new brand is more straightforward than refreshing an old one. This is because a new band has no existing framework of impressions to overcome to set the needed brand attributes for the new demographic. When we revitalized the IBM brand, it cost around $5B, which is unusually expensive, but that was because we needed to undo the bad impressions connected with the brand before we could move it back to positive territory, which was incredibly costly. It was worth it because the demographic, in this case, enterprise buyers, hadn’t changed, and they still recalled the brand fondly even though we had to overcome what had become a negative impression of it. 

In short, the first mistake was to take a brand tied to an older demographic and attributes defined by classic designs, engine sounds, value, and some exclusivity and try to get people to see it as something else.

Their approach was to make the brand, which would now be associated with electric cars rather than gas cars, more attractive to young liberal buyers, who tended to buy more electric vehicles than conservative buyers who make up Jaguar’s existing customer base. 

So, they hit hard on diversity, inclusion, and concepts that implied rebellion from conservative values to capture the interest of younger, more liberal buyers. Their approach alienated their existing base so badly that most appear to be planning to abandon the brand. It didn’t touch on why liberal younger buyers were buying electric cars, which was for conservation purposes and performance.  

The campaign doesn’t hit on either the brand attributes that Jaguar’s existing base has or the brand attributes that the base they want to attract wants on automobiles. Now, that doesn’t mean that liberal buyers don’t consider diversity, equity, and inclusion when choosing a company to buy from; these just aren’t attributed they use to choose a vehicle type in the first place; they are secondary considerations, and often these considerations are subordinate to their primary drivers of being green and high performance. 

What Jaguar/Tata Should Have Done

First, they should have created a different brand to lead this charge, as it would have been far less expensive to build up a new brand successfully than to try to pivot an old brand heavily. Second, they should have messaged on performance and energy efficiency (being green) and let the parent brand, Tata, address the fuzzier diversity, equity, and inclusion elements. Tata can carry warm and fuzzy stuff, but the new brand will be green and performance-oriented.   

The concept of “Woke” has been performing very poorly of late, and even Budweiser has been burned by using it to suggest someone in Jaguar marketing missed a critical meeting. But Jaguar is a car company, not an HR department, so the campaign should have been focused on the cars, not fuzzy behavioral attributes that buyers don’t connect to cars at all right now. 

Wrapping Up:

As a race, we don’t like change, so it is far easier to launch a new brand for a new demographic than to pivot an old one. Over the last two decades, Apple has been pivoting its brand to a younger audience, and they have spent millions and years doing this. Given the firm’s financial performance, its approach seems to be working reasonably well, showcasing how you can do this. Their campaigns are very product-focused, and attributes that aren’t product-focused are subtle or non-existent. 

It is clear that Jaguar's marketing department has little or no experience pivoting a brand, and few people do, as brands can last for generations. But when doing something that has been done before and that you have yet to do, it is always better to learn from or hire people with experience. Too often, marketing departments feel they don’t need to do that because how hard could it actually be?

It turns out hard in this instance, and there is a good chance Jaguar will not survive this pivot unless more experienced people step in and rethink this approach before Jaguar is no longer.  

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst at Torque News who covers automotive technology and battery development. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia and follow his articles on Forbes, X, and LinkedIn.