New Jaguar Ad Might Make You Run Out and Buy a … Chevrolet
“You must have hired the marketing director who got fired from Bud Light!”
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.
Have you met Bud Light? You’d get along great. https://t.co/CIkI3hN6CD
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) November 22, 2024
Were you wondering where the cars were? So was Elon Musk.
Do you sell cars?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2024
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:
Go woke go broke
— ANTOINE VEXIN (@antoinevexin11) November 20, 2024
Jaguar replied, “Go hard.”
Other reactions were equally critical:
Fire your marketing team. No one wants this kind of stuff anymore. pic.twitter.com/K3MgPXdQs9
— A Springfield Duck (@springfieldduck) November 19, 2024
I’ve never seen anything so ridiculous as Jaguar’s new logo which is replacing the iconic growling cat – pic.twitter.com/jafqP5jkGz
— TheGolfDivoTee™ (@TheGolfDivoTee) November 20, 2024
We love the classic Jaguar because it’s a beautiful car. You obviously care little about the car – just pushing your ideology. You’re relying on the approximately 1% or less of the population who are trans and their Marxist comrades in arms to purchase a very expensive car.…
— RoPal (@travelnut333) November 22, 2024
You must have hired the marketing director who got fired from Bud Light!
— RoPal (@travelnut333) November 22, 2024
— Patriot 58 (@Eduardo11547742) November 22, 2024
This was a better ad campaign, and it was from a movie with the late great Dudley Moore. pic.twitter.com/wHICHFZT13
— The Stupid Shall Be Punished (@stupidpunished) November 20, 2024
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.”
Santino Pietrosanti, an italian gay who disintegrated 102 years of a legendary car manufacturer reputation in a day.🌹 pic.twitter.com/SSK14RzS04
— Giovanni Colombo 🌹 (@X__GC__X) November 21, 2024
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.
If this is the second part of the Jaguar advertisement
It would go down as one of the greatest advert campaigns of all time
This would perfectly capture the energy in the room
pic.twitter.com/ZytL6DxWji— RŌNIN (@ronin21btc) November 23, 2024
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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Comments
Jags had a bad reputation for a long time. They improved quality and customer satisfaction. Then consolidation due to pressure of globalization hit auto industry. Jag has self destructed. No way the average Brit is gonna be willing to assist this carmaker. Great job killing off a classic Brit automaker to appeal to …who exactly, a bunch of woke hipsters in London who use mass transit and believe in green energy fairy tales when they aren’t blocking traffic or defacing art museums?
Jaguar is trying to appeal to people like JR, i.e. men that sit to piss.
Alissa Heinerscheid, of Bud Light fame, said something like, “These people are crazy, even I would never do that!”
Or words to that effect…
That’s amazing!
I owned a silver 1994 XJ6, made when Ford owned the company, from 1998 to 2016. Other than routine service, I had only one repair in all those years. It was a beautiful car. Ironically, because of the brand’s historically awful repair record (before Ford), I was able to buy it from a dealer in perfect condition in 1998 with about 50K miles, for the cost of a new Toyota Camry at the time. Easy decision. The subsequent purchase of the company by Tata and decline of the brand is just plain sad.
That was a very pretty car.
That was when XJs were still beautiful. That’s remarkable that you had the car for 18 years and it already had 50K miles on it. I wish they still made them.
Indeed. Every once in a while, someone would call out to me in the summer at a traffic light and ask what year mine was. It was still running well in 2016, except that the guy who serviced it told me one day, “You are going to have costly repairs before long and I have just the car for you” – a medium mileage, mint 2009 Mercedes E350 4Matic for a good price from a different customer. I got a 15 year newer, quality car that looks nowhere near as beautiful and still have it.
There’s also a new Volvo ad out, 3+ minutes. But it seems to want its customers to procreate and raise a next generation of customers.
Jaguar is a joke. The funny part of all this is that Jaguar is going all electric when Jaguars were always infamous for having the sh*ttiest electrical systems around. these were the weakest points of Jaguar cars and the reason why they always used to spend 80% of their time in the garage.
As to this nutty Bud-lite style ad … it’s interesting that Cadillac was doing these sorts of repulsive ads something like 10 years ago. They had a tranny – some weird semi-oriental, something or other who was one of their “stars” (along with a fat, sloppy Steve Wozniak).
Demonstrating only that gay tranny wokeness is a mental illness.
When Anheuser Busch did a commercial with Dylan Mulvaney they lost a lot of money, but it didn’t make bud wiser. They continued on their woke journey until finally they came up with a bright idea: they would help woke car companies sell cars. And Jaguar said, “Hey! That a great idea.”
The other thing with Jaguar is that they used to have the most beautiful cars on the road. A Jaguar would always make you take a second look. But that is long gone. The Jaguars of the last 20 years have been normal, nondescript – even ugly, in some cases – cars that no one would bother looking at twice. You could not even pick a Jag out of a parking lot, these days … unless you looked for the drag queens and trails of glitter.
Says someone who could never afford anything but a Chevy in the first place. Thou shalt not covet any of thy neighbor’s possessions.
Says someone whose mental health practitioner won’t even let him get a license…
I agree with you completely.
…or maybe buy a Prius.
Is it possible Jaguar is using “backlash” to “woke rebranding” to launder a fundamental business problem?
This ad fails in every direction, all 4 Pi steradians: esthetically, culturally, commercially, technically, optically, politically. British cars have traditionally been unreliable, poorly designed although attractive. A group of British factory workers once toured a Japanese auto plant and were amazed to see that the doors simply fit perfectly. Back home British auto workers wore leather aprons with mallets, and would pound on the doors to force fit. Tells you everything about British manufacturing. I owned a SAAB 96 back in the 1970s, and it kept burning valves because of defective metallurgy. Later I found out that the SAABs had British engines.
Britain is becoming a dead island. Less freedom than Russia. The ruling classes are obsessed with climate change. Well good luck guys.
In the 1990’s it was gay fashion designers who introduced consumers to heroin chic – female models presented as androgynous (male) junkies.
In 2024 they excised women from the modeling industry. Because they hate women.
That’s it! I’m going to boycott Jaguar just like I boycotted Bud Light. True, I never had any use for either of them but it’s the thought that counts!
Jaguar won’t lose any money though because after JR saw the commercial, he said, “That woke commercial turns me on so much I think I’ll buy two.”
I think Jaguar knew exactly what they were doin hiring this poof to run the ad campaign. They are losing market share by the buckets and so are forcing the company into bankruptcy to work out the financing. This will keep them a viable company to revamp everything. That or they really believe this stuff and don’t care if they go out of business as long as they hug their woke selves and feel good.
The advertising agencies propose sickening, woke ads to the corporate buyers. The white, male, overpaid executives are too afraid to say, “come back and show man a well-dressed, smiling white couple driving this Cadillac, not a gangsta rapper and his smirking ho.” The same principle here, but just more extreme.
I actually don’t care what Jaguar does. It is (or is held by) a company. The dynamics of capitalism is creative destruction. If a company makes too many errors, then they are out of business. The market place is not very forgiving. Governments on the other hand …
Jaguar calls it rebranding, but it might be the first tranny automobile.
Boy , Bud Light
Hold my beer
Tata owns Jaguar? Holy Cow, I guess the chains of oppression are off now.
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