Yes, Jaguar, who in the E-Type gave us the most beautiful British car ever made, the car of Steve McQueen and Mick Jagger. A brand redolent of speed, glamour and petrol, the last company you would attach to such car-less pap.
This is what happens when, presumably, you let modish 26-year-olds run amok in the marketing department of a grand old brand. Any company could be forgiven for giving the wrong person a go at the controls in the name of staying relevant. A misplaced pride flag here, a rogue Black Lives Matter tweet there. Yet it is the scale of the new campaign that indicates Jaguar is deep in crisis. This is not “feel good” DEI (diversity, equity & inclusion) window dressing, but a total change of direction. Jaguar is relaunching as an all-electric brand. There is a new logo, with upper and lower case letters “seamlessly blended” – as in a toddler’s notebook – and a redrawn cat logo. New models are on the way.
The firm has to try something. When social media predictably turned on the new ad, Tesla boss Elon Musk led the way. “Do you sell cars?” he asked. The short answer is: not many. Sales are in free fall, down 70 per cent in the US in the past five years. In the UK, the brand has drifted into irrelevance, a byword for a certain kind of reactionary middle-aged man. The writers of Alan Partridge chose his favourite car perfectly.
You can see the intent: move away from the old men and towards a younger part of the market. There is no shame in selling. But this ad only shows the company has lost sight of what it stands for.
Even as recently as 2015, there was still a clear sense of identity, exemplified in its ad with Mark Strong and Tom Hiddleston and Sir-to-you Ben Kingsley celebrating British villainy: wit, power, charm. Why replace something so distinct with such boilerplate fashion-brand nonsense?
The criticism from Musk will sting because he is a huge part of the problem. Jaguar moved from competing with luxury cars, like Aston Martin, to going up against Audi and BMW for business-class electric models. Then Tesla came along and blew them all out of the water. A series of missteps have left Jaguar caught in no-man’s land between past and future and running out of options. The advert feels less like a rebrand and more like a final grim-eyed throw of the dice.
Perhaps it will work. Doubtless there will be internal emails talking about how they wanted to provoke columnists. And maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps the world is full of 26-year-olds who would love to cash in their Bitcoin for a Jag if only it embraced wokery more enthusiastically. But I doubt it. Customers hate being patronised. The panic that steams off this advert does not inspire confidence.
Even if the business struggles back to life, there is something dismaying about the new direction. Jaguar, for so long synonymous with pride in British design and engineering, reduced to platitudes. No firm wants to live in the past; but what if the past is all you have?