2: Deleting ordinary - On Jags and judgement
Light a candle for your resident brand team. They're going through it.
I’m sure every person or team that has ever led a rebrand is gritting their teeth today. Consciously or otherwise, you’re absorbing a shockwave. The trials, tribulations, and Greek tragedy of it all feels palpably close. And somewhere, quietly, in the back of your mind, you’re thinking: I’m so glad this isn’t me.
The out-of-body experience of watching the Jaguar rebrand announcement happen, and tank, in real time, has been flooding my professional channels for the last 20 some hours. Remember that hot-takeism on LinkedIn I referenced in my last Stack? It is a feeding frenzy on there right now. To the point where, if I were measuring pure permeation as a success metric of this rebrand, it could be considered one of the most successful of all time - and we’re only at the teaser.
The trouble is, the work seems to have been created with becoming meme-fodder in mind. Bland -isms like ‘delete ordinary’ and ‘live vivid’ flash up on screen in the new brand film, alongside too-saturated colours, and a cast of intense-looking individuals that look like they’d be more at home in a Toni and Guy ad from the late 00s than a Jaguar dealership (why does the future have so many asymmetrical haircuts?).
As for the new logo - it lives somewhere between tech and wellness - it’s very round, it’s very thin, it’s very… forgettable. Truthfully, it put me in mind of sushi - Tanpopo or Kokoro - maybe that’s a whole other article. But this is… Honestly? Very demure, very mindful, maybe cutesy… but not Jag.
Even as I write this, I’m making my own teeth itch. It’s too open a goal. So much so that several times I’ve wondered if this is an ill-judged PR stunt, and a precursor to the real rebrand (it IS a teaser), a funny little ‘whodunnit’ to reflect on cultural capital built around the deconstruction of creative ideas.
Everything in me wants to scream at this - ‘whyyyyyyyy?!’ But I’m not into a pile on, I loathe the internet telling me how I feel about things before I’ve had the space to decide (although it inevitably always does), and I genuinely believe in the value in looking at things with an open mind - so, here we go. My most optimistic look at what Jaguar did this week and, because I’m fundamentally just as shitty as everyone else, some scores on the doors for how this teaser has played out.
Timing is everything
Everything Jaguar is looking to do - move to all-electric, pivot to a new demographic of buyer with different values, and yes, maybe shed some unhelpful associations - says rebrand. New product(s) + new offer + new audience + challenge assumptions. A practical brand strategy cocktail of all the classics, pointing you towards a significant repositioning. So far, so sound judgement.
They’ve just had a record year, their most profitable since 2015, and the waitlist sign ups for their electric offer are soaring. You’re looking at this picture as a brand team and thinking: fertile ground. This is the moment to strike with an inspiring and reinvigorated vision for the future of Jaguar.
Culturally, though, not so rosy. We’re in a bit of a global binfire in case it passed anyone by, reminiscent of the heady days of 2016. The headlines are full of a second Trump presidency, billionaire demagogues, the brink of nuclear war, the small matter of our 1.5 degree climate accord being laughable. Landing anything right now - specifically this week - would have me shaking my head viciously in the direction of my Communications team. The read of the room is unilateral, and the read of the room is: holy hell.
The thing about the culture wars that the media love to stoke to add to this hellscape is that they absolutely love something fresh to feed on and, while the in-house brand team at Jaguar probably didn’t think it was going to be their rebrand… well, Merry Christmas. We’re all brand experts now, and we all REALLY care about luxury car brands.
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Score: 2/10. Holding off until the new year when the world’s a bit more energised about fresh starts, or going earlier pre-election before people needed to flood the TL with something to vent at would’ve been my advice.

Heritage rebrands and their heavy crowns
When undertaking a repositioning of that scale - this isn’t just a shift on or a tweak (sorry Mark Ritson, we can agree to disagree here) - brand strategists will inevitably look for the right balance of what to bring with you, and what to sacrifice to the altar of your brand’s history. That balance should be based almost entirely on the feedback of your biggest fans, and your most desired buyers. That’s all, that’s the formula. Yes, there’s an important weight to the voice of your own people in the mix, but if your job is to exchange goods for cash money? You need to put yourself so comfortably into the soles of the shoes of your buyer that you can moonwalk home.
I can’t see easily who Jaguar have spoken to to get to this. I’d love to look at their personas as I’m certain they have them, and I’m certain they’re detailed. When I imagine a Jaguar buyer, regardless of white hair and social class and driving gloves, beyond all of that - I imagine someone that really values that mark. The leaping cat, the name, the sleek, smooth silhouette of a luxury car that is quite simply just beautiful. This is a brand for aesthetes. It’s a brand of movie stars, Don Draper, of leather-lined everything, and fundamentally… Britishness. And, let’s face it, Britishness is having its own identity crisis right now. Be that as it may, in order to redefine it (if that was the thought), you at least need to pull on some thread of truth.
Given that this is a teaser for fuller work, perhaps that thread isn’t immediately visible to us, and wasn’t meant to be. But we at least need a wink. Best I can tell, the closest thing we have to that wink is ‘Copy Nothing’ - words derived from Jaguar’s founder Sir William Lyons’ famous quote: ‘A Jaguar should be a copy of nothing’. And I’ll give jaGUar this - that line is the strongest thing in the creative so far.
The tidal wave of emotion and outcry in response to this teaser - which doesn’t give away a huge amount - is that it wasn’t enough. One of the favourite cries of the armchair critique after a rebrand is ‘heritage!’ ‘heritage!’ - I’ve been on the receiving end of those cries - but the volume (in loudness and quantitative terms) of this feedback would have me concerned. Maybe this was always the gameplan - set fire to the old ways to usher in the new. A dangerous play, if a bold one: I can’t easily think of a brand that has pulled this off successfully without looking flippant. Again, I have to stress that I don’t think this is a piece of work that JLR’s in-house team made flippantly. Quite the opposite.
Score: 3/10*. I so wanted to be more generous with this as I love ‘Copy Nothing’, but I just don’t think I can. At the moment this reads like a lobotomisation - a directive to forget everything that has come before - and I just don’t think that’s possible. I do add the * though, as I’m certain this teaser will open up more heritage in the fuller realisation of the new identity.
Let them eat creative
So where did the disconnect happen? Having led a rebrand of a heritage brand, I know how critical that golden thread is. You pore over whether or not you have selected the right one, or ones. You try so many different iterations to get that delicate balance right between homage to your glorious past (whether glorious or not, the effect of nostalgia ups its weight) and vision of your reimagined future. In my experience, where I’ve seen these things go wrong is when that brand debt is settled by:
Loud voices involved in approving or endorsing the work that are fearful of change and reluctant to give up control
Large egos involved in creating the work that are putting their personal interests ahead of what’s best for the brand
Some combination of the above
To see that you have these problems becomes a really tricky thing to do when you’re in it. And even harder still to solve. It’s why big beautiful branding agencies still have a place in the world, because often your best shot is to let the professionals step in and diagnose the thing. Still, even with the purest of intentions, and the sharpest of briefs? Sometimes the well just gets poisoned. And that’s when you go to your second killswitch - audience testing.
Notoriously painful to go through and not for the faint-hearted, focus group testing of rebrands is often harsh. Very harsh. As we’re seeing playing out now, we tend not to like change, and we reject the unfamiliar. But this absolutely pivotal step gives you a crucial read of the room and signals what you can expect with a wider launch or teaser. It’ll flag peoples’ visceral reactions, their big problems, and the big opportunities, if you’re asking the right question. I suspect that audience testing here showed the obvious: this is a total departure from your past. Again, I’m sure this would have been a crucial metric for success. However what I’m less certain of is whether enough searching questions were asked about emotional reactions - negative and positive - to the identity.
Confirmation bias can make us do insane things and, sometimes, it’s just the amount of delulu you need to pull one of these off… Because here’s what - it does take guts. It takes a real pair to say: ‘We’ve built up years of brand equity in this space, but that isn’t serving where we want to go. Time to blow it up.’ One of the things you’ll read ad infinitum in the hot-take-soup is how other car brands - even big established ones - would kill for Jaguar’s brand recognition. That’s as may be, but if it wasn’t fulfilling the direction of travel, someone has to say ‘time to change’ and follow through with that.
Or perhaps what we’re seeing now is the audience testing, and this huge outcry is all a part of a choreographed plan to put this idea out into the world. Maybe there are still tweaks happening in the lab, or maybe for the sliver of the world we’re seeing, there’s an entire imagined world and context that we’re not yet aware of. Either way, one thing that is certain is they made a decision to risk it all. And is that not something we can all relate to, or certainly anyone that has ever done one of these things?
Score: Honestly, 10/10. I’m not going to assume that I’ve got authority to undermine the amount of testing they’ve done - whether they’ve done it or not, or how much or how little, at some point a call was made to stick this landing. And that takes ‘nads. It’s worth our applause. You can’t be ‘half in’ on a rebrand.
Fundamentally, it’s really difficult doing this stuff. I say that without an ounce of patronising tone - this is quite literally my day job. It’s a ‘sing when you’re winning’ discipline where, until the first piece of negative feedback, everyone thinks you’re onto genius ideas. It’s ‘gutsy’, until it’s wrong. It’s strategic and visionary, until someone on Twitter (sorry, X… case in point) has a rant about what they don’t like about your new colour palette. It’s bruising, but the people that do this work do it because they genuinely love and believe in the brands they work for. And we love to watch them do what they do. This is our gladiatorial games. So let’s show a bit of respect and stop bandwagon-jumping, take a pause, and let them land before we bay for blood. Lest we forget - we’re all only one hot take away from the same cultural pile on.
Your thoughts on updating a heritage brand are so on point and hugely valuable to this - what has turned out to be - pretty toxic debate.