British sports car and luxury vehicle manufacturer Jaguar kicked off a major rebranding campaign this week on social media. Unfortunately, its first advertisement, unveiled on Tuesday, may have alienated far more potential buyers than it attracted. In fact, according to finance website FinBold, the fierce backlash to the ad caused shares of Jaguar’s parent company, Tata Motors, to fall on a day when most other prices were rallying on the National Stock Exchange of India.
The widely mocked 30-second spot features a racially diverse group of genderfluid individuals dressed in garish, brightly colored clothing. As the dour-faced actors emerge from what looks like a bright yellow pod, electronic music plays in the background. Messages are intermittently displayed on the screen that read: create exuberant, live vivid, delete ordinary, break moulds, copy nothing, and finally the brand appears. “Jaguar” is written using a combination of lower- and uppercase letters.
Please watch the ad first, and then we’ll talk.
Were you wondering where the cars were? So was Elon Musk.
The company responded to Musk: “Yes. We’d love to show you. Join us for a cuppa in Miami on 2nd December? Warmest regards, Jaguar.”
Another X user wrote:
Jaguar replied, “Go hard.”
Other reactions were equally critical:
Forbes reported that the ad was widely mocked on Instagram as well. “Nearly all the top-liked Instagram comments on Jaguar’s post are critical, with the top comment, liked more than 13,000 times, claiming the company ‘killed a British icon.'”
The Daily Mail reported that the man behind Jaguar’s woke rebrand, Santino Pietrosanti, is a “BLM-supporting executive from New York who lives with [his] Scottish husband and their cockapoo Mia.”
According to the Mail, Pietrosanti spoke at Virgin Atlantic’s “Attitude Awards” event in October and “boasted that Jaguar had ‘established over 15 DEI groups’ as part of a ‘transformative journey.'” Clad in “a spangled dinner jacket over a see-through t-shirt,” he told the crowd that the rebrand would “bring Jaguar back to something truly special.” Here are some excerpts from his remarks:
We’re not just talking about new cars. We are talking about all new ways of thinking and embracing the full spectrum of human potential and creativity.
Because Jaguar has always stood for fearless originality striving to be a copy of nothing. And we believe that every person has the potential to be something unique, something original, and that’s what makes us strong.
And at Jaguar we proudly stand with the LGBTQ+ community because we know that originality and creativity thrives in spaces where people are free to be themselves.
We’re passionate about our people and we’re committed to fostering a diverse inclusive and unified culture that is representative of not only the people who use our products but in a society in which we all live.
The comparisons to Bud Light’s disastrous decision in April 2023 to partner with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote sales of its beer began immediately. You may recall Mulvaney gushing to viewers in a cringeworthy video, “This month, I celebrated my 365 days of womanhood, and Bud Light sent me possibly the best gift ever — a can with my face on it.”
It had been an unforced error made by a misguided, out-of-touch marketing executive who tried to impose her woke worldview upon a clientele that wanted none of it. And the company that had appealed to working-class, ordinary, and decidedly unwoke people for generations deserved the boycott and the steep decline in market capitalization that followed.
Why would Pietrosanti and his team of 800 employees repeat such a major blunder? And why would Jaguar’s management allow it?
Jaguar has fallen on hard times according to Marketing Week’s Mark Ritson.
Although this is pure speculation on my part, it’s very possible the decline in sales started around 2000 when the company began tinkering with the design of its classic XJ model. By 2009, it had lost the sleek, elegant, and distinctive lines that had attracted discerning buyers for decades. In 2010, the company completely revamped the body of the XJ to the point where it was no longer recognizable as a Jaguar. This radical change caused many once loyal customers to move on. And sales slowly eroded.
Ritson (who sounds like he once drove – and loved – a Jaguar or two) was extremely critical of the company’s rebranding. He wrote:
Oh f***, Jaguar, what have you done?I appreciate things have not been easy in recent years. That your once sparkling reputation has been tarnished by poor reliability and a garage full of often average cars. That you’ve been traded from one parent company to another with barely a thought for your brand. And that when you landed at Tata Motors you had to face the ignominy of being outshone by sister brand Land Rover. For every Jaguar sold last year they shifted six.
He predicted, “That ratio will disappear completely next year, when Jaguar stops producing or selling anything. For the next 12 months, perhaps longer, the company will make nothing but headlines.”
“Jaguar has rebranded when it needed to revitalize,” Ritson explained. “Jaguar’s bizarre new campaign marks a complete overhaul of its positioning, when instead it should have celebrated and updated what once made it great.”
But, according to Ritson, “Jaguar no longer cares about retaining its current customer base. … The company expects to retain only 10% to 15% of its current customer base. Jaguar will shift its targeting to younger, wealthier, more urban shoppers that the company describes as ‘design-minded’ and ‘cash-rich, time-poor.’”
New isn’t always better and all I can say to Pietrosanti and his colleagues is good luck.
I’ll leave you with one X user’s suggestion about how to inject some “energy” into the new ad campaign.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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