The Jaguar brand trade off

Oh, my, I’m excited about today’s topic.

If you’re even remotely connected to the advertising & marketing world, you’ve seen the new Jaguar announcement. If you haven’t, here it is below.

Opinions have been pretty single-minded about this new brand positioning.

It’s shit. Where’s the car? Go woke, go broke.

Even our Troll-In-Chief had something to say about it:

Love Jaguar’d response to his tweet btw:

Moving on, I’ll admit, even my own reaction to it was that it’s bad and that it's a huge missed opportunity to take advantage of the cultural trends and go back to its roots.

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There’s a re-masculinity trend happening and Jaguar could have taken advantage of that to gain momentum and positive TOV.

Almost every branding expert I’ve seen has trash talked Jaguar, the new positioning and new branding.

Unfortunately, most niche experts are the epitome of the expression “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

While you go through today’s edition, here’s a little brain nugget for you. It’s unconventional, just like Jaguar’s new branding.

This is called Lateral Thinking for a reason.

When everyone zigs, we zag.

For starters, let’s ask some questions.

• Is Jaguar doing well?

• Why such a shift from their current TOV and brand?

• They’re a legendary brand, but how has the last few decades treated them?

I’m not going to go into a huge rabbit hole, but some simple research on these 3 topics turned up the following:

• Jaguar sales are down 66% from their peak

• Since the 90’s, Jaguar has lost over $15 billion dollars

• It switched hands from Ford to Tata Motors in 2008 in one of the most expensive games of “pass the hot potato”

Knowing that owning the Jaguar brand is equivalent to flushing billions of dollars down the drain, would any sane person say “let’s keep doing the same thing”?

A totally fresh approach targeting crypto bros and wealthy Gen Z’ers might not be the right move, but it’s definitely a better move than trying to target the same Millennials and Baby Boomers that haven’t brought the company any financial success whatsoever.

The problem is - a traditional agency would have done a Mad Men type of pitch, showing you the Jaguar of the 60s and saying “it’s time to make Jaguar great again”.

Which sounds great on paper, but it speaks to an audience that is long gone. The few customers they already have will most likely stick with the brand out of loyalty. Even if they don’t, that won’t be the end of the world for Jaguar.

To clarify, this is not a comment about whether the rebranding is good or bad. Apart from the Jaguar team, nobody has enough information to say for sure yet.

But it’s good to go against the grain and try to open your lateral thinking pores by trying to figure out why they would go into such a different direction.

Answer: NASA. The clocks are sold to NASA for use in the control rooms for the Martian rover to keep in time with the rovers on Mars.

As usual, much appreciation and love to Lateral with Tom Scott for the puzzles and brain teasers.