The company that makes Jaguars today isn’t the same as the one that founded it. The brand has been around for a century, having been owned by Ford Motor Company for a while, and then by Tata Motors. It’s Jaguar Landrover these days, but not for very much longer. The company promised to make all its vehicles electric by 2025, and to celebrate this horrible decision, they’ve added an abominable woke rebrand.
While other firms quietly dial back their DEI excesses, Jaguar doubled down, unleashing a teaser ad showcasing “gender-fluid” models prancing around in outlandish, avant-garde garb. It’s a far cry from the sleek sophistication that once defined the brand, and the backlash has been ferocious.
The cars themselves are a pastel-colored fever dream, drenched in Miami-inspired hues like cotton-candy pink and seafoam green. Whether Jaguar will deign to offer the market’s preferred colors, black, white, silver, or grey, remains a mystery, but their silence on the matter speaks volumes.
Anheuser-Busch is no longer the gold standard for virtue-signalling cultural stupidity. Its leap off the cliff involved choosing Dylan Mulvaney (a man) as the face of Women’s Day. It cost them 20% of their market forever (it seems). Gillette made a grave mistake when it decided that it could sell more razors to men if it portrayed them as toxic bullies. Parent Procter & Gamble had to step in, but not before incurring an $ 8 billion write-off.
Those are bad, but Jaguar appears to have had a hold my beer moment with a pivot that has resulted in a 97% decline in global sales.
The new logo doesn’t even include the iconic Jaguar.
I’m not saying change is bad. Change is inevitable and leads to innovation, but some things can be improved without undermining the foundations that made them great.
America, for example. There’s no nation like it on the planet, but it is forever under attack by those who would see it fall so they could benefit. The act of those incapable of competing, which makes me wonder if the Jaguar rebrand isn’t some sort of corporate espionage. A reasonable course of inquiry, except that stupid marketing pivots are so common that Robby Starbuck made a career out of exposing them on Twitter.
I guess he missed Jaguar.
It was a brand built on a tradition of appealing to conservative wealth in search of timeless style, wrapping a powerful carbon-energy-fueled machine. Who decided to crap all over that and were they previously employed at Gillette or Budweiser?
And is Land Rover next, or will the Jaguar debacle and the marketplace send a strong enough message in time to save them both?
If a 97% drop in sales isn’t a strong enough message, nothing is.
