Everyone is talking about the Jaguar rebrand. The 30-second launch video, which dropped four days ago, has come in for particular attention. But there’s also the new logo and removal of the “growler” big cat emblem that has adorned so many Jaguar cars over the decades. Many people are up in arms, acting like parent company JLR has smashed a kitten with a sledgehammer. At first, I was dubious too. But not anymore. Here’s why.
Jaguar Land Rover’s Revived Fortunes
First, it’s important to underline the context. JLR had been going through some financial difficulties five years ago but has turned that around more recently. The group overall is now profitable and is reducing its debt. One of the key elements in that success has been the ability of the Range Rover brand to sell unfeasibly expensive special edition models. In early 2023, the company had sold 6,000 Range Rover SVs averaging over £100,000 ($125,000) apiece.
This marked a turnaround in strategy for the company. In 2019, the average sale price for a car from JLR was £44,000 ($55,000). By early 2023, it was £71,000 ($89,000). The company was selling 660,000 units a year in 2019, but not making a profit. By 2023, the volume had dropped to 300,000 units, but with a positive balance sheet. The Range Rover and Land Rover models reportedly now make $25,000 profit each on average.
The problem in 2023 was that 75% of its orders at that time were from Range Rover, Range Rover Sport and Defender models. Jaguar was still a net drag on resources, making a loss per car. There are still some much-loved models in the portfolio, such as the F-type, but the brand only sold 64,241 units worldwide in 2023 out of JLR’s total of 431,733. It was clearly not good economic sense to keep Jaguar going in its existing form, so the Reimagine strategy announced in 2021 and fleshed out in early 2023 entailed the end of all internal combustion sales and a relaunch as an all-electric automaker. Jaguar is ending sales in the UK this month, which will mean a break of over a year before the EVs kick in.
This strategy has been known for over a year, and already had its detractors who lamented the demise of Jaguar’s V6, V8 and V12 engines, reminisced about the racing pedigree, and questioned where this left those who have loved the brand over the decades. The new electric Jaguar won’t be JLR’s first EV, with the electric Range Rover set for imminent launch. But that’s going to coexist with combustion-powered versions for a few years to come. The new electric Jaguar will be a clean slate, with not even the I-Pace remaining.
Jaguar Reimagined
Then came the new video advert. My 20-year-old son described it in ways I can’t repeat here. Colleagues wondered if there were enough non-binary customers for the new Jaguar. The right-wing culture wars rallying cry of “go woke, go broke” has been particularly frequent in appearance. The comments on the YouTube video seemed to almost universally consider the new image suicidal. My first reaction was “where is the car?” and Elon Musk’s first comment was along those lines too.
But four days later, having seen the media reaction, I’ve changed my mind. Even the BBC is covering the backlash as breaking news. At the time of writing, the video has had 1.5 million views, and over 24,000 comments. I can’t remember any automaking launch or rebrand getting this much attention in all my years writing about the car industry.
From my totally unscientific subjective perspective, the attention has generally been quite negative. But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. As Oscar Wilde famously said, “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” If a brand isn’t profitable, that by implication means its existing customer base doesn’t provide sufficient financial benefit. To all those who complain about alienating core customers, they weren’t really working out for Jaguar as an ongoing concern anyway. Jaguar is going upmarket towards customers it didn’t have many of before, more like those who will buy a Range Rover for $200,000.
The content of the advertisement is a red herring. The point is that everyone is now looking at Jaguar. A representative from JLR has asked me to reserve judgement until the actual car is revealed, but that’s not far away – on 2nd December. Everyone will want to see exactly what the fuss is all about now, and that won’t have waned in the week or so between now and then.
I’ve actually seen it already, heavily hidden under camouflage disguise at a test track I was visiting for another reason (they told me not to take photos and I begrudgingly complied). Even behind these black-and-white coverings, the vehicle looked sleek and audacious. The company is investing £15 billion over five years to electrify Jaguar, so there will be solid technical underpinnings for the vehicle, aided by the battery software intelligence of specialist Elysia.
In the end, it will be all about the car that is released on 2nd December. With a price expected to be above £100,000 ($125,000), the new electric Jaguar will need to be very special indeed. But thanks to all the controversy around the branding video, the world is now watching. And that’s a stroke of genius.
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