Storied British automaker Jaguar recently rebranded itself with a new logo featuring the letters of its name in a rounded and mixed-case typeface, a lurid color scheme, and gibberish vibe slogans such as "create exuberant." More suggestive of fashion or sexual wellness branding than fast cars, the campaign was a dud. The company is firing its ad agency.
Jag took heat from every corner of the media and car enthusiast worlds over its change, which saw it shift to electric vehicles and abandon any sense of traditional auto design. The vehicles it showed were comically overdone and painted in Easter Egg pastel colors, leading many to note that the automaker had left its core audience behind.
Not a single car was shown in the initial ad, whose facile corporate diversity messaging gave the worst people something else to complain about. Here's how you might do woke in 2025: hard racy EDM cover of the The New Seekers, I'd Like To Give The World a Jag. British flags, British colors.
I'm fascinated at how this Zoolander-esque campaign came to be—how it could get conceived, pitched, developed and produced, burning tens or hundreds of millions of dollars—without anyone realizing how it might land? The BBC offers an answer: desperation: "Jaguar's problems run deeper than a five-minute frenzy on social media."
