The Jaguar rebranding debacle is a classic example of Oscar Wilde’s old adage about people knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. The very reason why the leaping cat motif, which has been a feature of Jaguar cars for almost a century, stood the test of time was because it was so bleedin’ obvious.
“Oh look, there’s the new Jaguar. I might buy one.”
Now, in its infinite wisdom, the car company has decided to ditch the iconic symbol in favour of a logo which has the appearance of being knocked up by a five-year-old on an iPad. Jaguar is spelled JaGUar in what appears to me to be a blatant rip off of those posh, one-pot desserts with an umlaut that you can buy at Waitrose.
The quite unnecessary rebrand comes complete with an advertisement featuring lots of men dressed as women – but not a car in sight. Genius, right?
Wrong.
This sans-serifisation of society, this dispensing of tradition in favour of modernity, is so short sighted, it’s actually bordering on the ridiculous.
Future generations will look back on this campaign and regard it as the equivalent of leg warmers or shell suits – so achingly of its time as to be, to use 21st-century parlance, utterly cringe.
The biggest irony here is that the Gen Zers this rebrand has been designed to attract are actually repelled by this sort of pretentious nonsense.
They actively seek out heritage brands these days, which is why we’ve seen a surge in teenagers wearing vintage Ralph Lauren, second-hand Barbour jackets and repurposing their mothers’ old Longchamp handbags.
It might also help explain why the new chief of Burberry, which has issued two profit warnings this year, has said the company strayed too far from its roots of “timeless core collections”. And last week, there were even reports of schoolchildren buying up old flip and brick mobile phones on eBay because they have grown sick and tired of the cyber woes of smartphones.
The Jaguar rebrand isn’t just a case of go woke, go broke. In echoes of the removal of the Union flag from the back of British Airways jets, it feels like yet another back-door attempt to erase our history.
Railing against this sort of virtue signalling revisionism does not make you a Luddite. As Gustav Mahler once said: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”.