As some of you will have observed from my YouTube channel, I mess about with cars and sometimes make videos about tinkering with them, along with my mate Chris. As he is a professional mechanic and I am most assuredly not, I do play up to the “doesn’t know much about cars and is a bit of a berk” thing.
However, while I am undoubtedly a berk, cars are one of the two things I actually know way too much about (actually there’s three, I forgot Star Wars). The other thing is branding and creative. This is because, for the last 30 years, I’ve worked as a graphic designer and creative lead, specialising in branding. And for the last 5 or 6 years, I’ve also worked as an automotive writer for a number of outlets. So when it comes to rebranding, oh I don’t know, let’s say an automotive product or line, I do know what I’m doing. I’m not in any way bragging, I am scene-setting.
Which brings us to Jaguar.
Oh Jaguar. You poor, sweet, summer child.
It cannot possibly have escaped your notice that, over the last few days, Jaguar’s brand launch / reset / renaissance / whatever they decide to call it today has attracted quite a few column inches. As well as much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Jaguar enthusiast and most of the design community, there’s been an air of confusion and general “what the hell” from the public. So let’s break down what Jaguar have done, why they may have done it, and whether it’s actually any good.
Now, before we dive too deep, there are two things we need to establish. Firstly, I love Jaguar. I think they’ve made some of the most beautiful and iconic cars of the 20th century, and the potential offered by their brand and racing heritage is beaten only by Ferrari or Porsche. Secondly, I am absolutely not talking about their yet to be revealed new cars here. I haven’t seen them – hardly anyone outside the internal team has – so cannot and will not judge them. This is purely about the brand ident they have so far released, what it tells us about their direction of travel as a company and the quality of the creative thinking inside the company.
With that out of the way, let’s talk branding. Some of you may work in the space and will already know this, but for those who don’t, first we need to establish what a brand is, how that differs from branding and why it matters. I’m going to try and condense decades of training and experience into a couple of hundred words here, so it will be hugely simplified. Bear with.
One element of branding is design. According to the American Institute of Graphics Arts (AIGA) “designers use typography, photographs, illustrations, and graphic elements to construct messages that attract attention, cause us to think about their meaning, and stay in our memories over time”.
Effectively, it’s using a combination of messaging – which could be visual, aural, spoken, read or felt – to solve problems and communicate information.
Intent is a key element of design. This is where we consider the audience in terms of delivery channels, cultural references and accessibility. We also carefully consider the purpose – what is this thing for, why is it different, what reason to people have to react to this and how so we want them to react (also known as the call to action). All of this and much more informs the design. If you want to know what makes for objectively “good” design, then Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles is a great place to start.
Now let’s consider brand and branding, which are different. At its most basic, your brand is the totality of how your business is perceived by those outside the organisation. You have an internal brand too, but that’s a different thing. So your design, tone of voice, comms, product – everything customers and suppliers see, hear and touch – is your brand.
Branding is how marketers and brand teams manage that perception by using emotion, consistency and recognition to encourage certain actions, interactions or behaviours. Really good branding is always underpinned by clear mission (what you do), vision (where you’re headed) and values (the attitudes and behaviours that will get you there). These have to be clear, well-defined, understandable and something that your target demographic will readily buy into.
That’s a bit of a basic, slightly business-y overview, but you get the general idea. Now we have to address the elephant in the room: are there issues with what we’ve seen so far of Jaguar’s relaunched brand?
Yes. Yes there are. First, there seems to be confusion over what it is – is it a relaunch, a rebrand, a reset or a renaissance? These are all different things and Jaguar’s representatives seem to be using all of these terms to describe it.
Of course, this wouldn’t matter if what they’d shown looked fabulous. Unfortunately this is anything but the case. The now infamous launch video showed a colour palette and brand ident quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen from Jaguar, or any other luxury car brand fr that matter. Now, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, I love a bold colour palette. The brand was becoming stale and a good shake up can be just what’s needed to reinvigorate a company.
However, while you can successfully introduce a big change of direction in terms of aesthetic and tone (for instance, look at how Apple moved from a boring beige aesthetic to the jewel-like iMac and its associated branding in the 90s), you still need clearly stated values and messaging that your customers can get behind. And the aesthetic must complement the messaging, not fight it. More on this later.
Additionally, if you’re not completely renaming and rebranding, then there has to be some key-in to the company’s history, a recognisable, relatively substantial nod to the great things that have gone before. Otherwise you completely alienate your current and previous client base as well as potentially causing employee engagement issues.
Which is where, in my opinion, Jaguar have gone very wrong. The first mistake they made is keeping the name ‘Jaguar’. That may sound like an odd thing to say, but they are marketing this as a complete reset. The phrase ‘copy nothing’ is being used, attributed to the founder, Sir William Lyons, who apparently said a Jaguar should “be a copy of nothing”. Despite this, the brand team are going to great lengths to tell us to forget everything that has gone before, completely divorcing their work from the brand’s history. They even deleted all their previous social media content, making it clear this was to be a hard reset, not a simple visual refresh.
Only it isn’t a hard reset. By retaining the name ‘Jaguar’, using a phrase attributed to their founder and reusing the ‘leaper’ graphic, they are clearly attempting to tie this new direction into their history. So which is it? A reflection of their heritage or a bold new start that isn’t looking back? Because it can’t be both. Marketing it as a completely fresh start is disingenuous and cynical at best, rank hypocrisy at worst.
The fact that Jaguar’s actions aren’t aligning with what they’re saying tells me that the brand team know that they absolutely cannot afford to completely trash Jaguar’s decades of brand equity, recognition and heritage, but also want (or are under orders) to position this approach as completely unrelated, groundbreaking and innovative. That opens them up to accusations of treating consumers like credulous fools – and customers never like being taken for fools.
Then we come to the ident itself. Did it need to be updated? Absolutely. The ‘leaper’ and ‘growler’ elements are world famous graphic elements that could be well interpreted with a clean, modern aesthetic. The wordmark itself would be relatively simple to modernise so that it nods toward the company’s fantastic heritage, while offering a more modern, elegant look and feel.
This isn’t what has happened. For some reason, the new logo incorporates a highly geometric font and a mash-up of cases as well as a truly bizarre ‘J’ treatment. Jaguar describe is as “modern” and “distinctive” with a “timelessness that’s seen as contemporary”. Well it’s certainly modern, distinctive and contemporary, I’ll give them that. Timeless? Well that’s impossible to say until something has successfully stood the test of time, but personally I think it’s going to age like week old milk.
From a purely technical point of view, there are all manner of issues. The kerning is off. The tiny descenders on the lower case ‘a’ forms will disappear at anything more than close-up, which means it will read “JoGuor” to most people, much of the time. Added to this, the mix of uppercase and lowercase letters is just weird, and has presumably been done to avoid a descender on the ‘g’. The problems with both the ‘a’ and ‘G’ letterforms could have been easily avoided by simply sticking to uppercase. (I do have another theory regarding the capitalised G, which mostly involves the fact that a certain Chief Creative Officer’s name begins with G, but let’s not go there…)
Apparently the wordmark uses a custom typeface, which appears to be a tweaked version of the freely available and rather low-rent ‘Comfortaa’. Which doesn’t exactly scream “boutique luxury”. Seeing as the typeface naturally contains both lowercase and uppercase ‘J’ letterforms, I also have to ask why the heck haven’t they used them?The ‘J’ at the front of the logo isn’t even a ‘J’. It’s actually just the lowercase ‘r’ from the end of the logo, but rotated 180-degrees. Which is the kind of thing you do in the first term of design school just before your tutor gives you a right royal telling off and an hour long lecture on the virtues of typographic principles. I’ve no idea why they would do this, there’s literally no benefit to it so far as I can see. Technically it means the logo says “raGuar”. Which is weird. And stupid. And not at all luxurious.
Then we have the colours. I’m all for bold colours and experimental palettes, but they have to be brand and tone appropriate. Whether we like it or not, colours convey specific messages. There’s a reason you don’t see bright yellow hearses or brown Formula 1 cars. The chosen colour schemes here are less “the future of luxury transport” and more “weird fashion week version of the Teletubbies”.
It also has more than a dash of AI strangeness to it. I’m not entirely convinced there isn’t a bit of that going on, to be honest.
I do have a suspicion that the emphasis of red for the roundel logo that’s been used on social media is a cynical attempt to cosy up to the Chinese market too, where red is seen as a signal of good luck and wealth. If this is the case it would be… problematic. It also bears a quite striking similarity to the Japanese flag. Slightly confusing for a classic British brand.
One thing I know for certain, that textured finish inside the roundel doesn’t have the contrast to be DDA compliant and will all but disappear at any kind of distance or small size. Adding that kind of detail and texture to a logo completely goes against the contemporary and minimalist tone that Jaguar have said they’re aiming for. It’s all a bit odd and, once again, seems to indicate an almost bipolar internal tension in the brand team.
Then we come to the ‘growler’. This certainly needed an update, and was eminently suitable to a cleaner, more modern interpretation. Instead, we have a ‘monogram’ in the form of a broken circle with the ‘J/r’ elements from the logo wedged in. It’s simple to the point of being lifeless. It looks for all the world like a clasp on a belt. The more muted tones they’ve used to show off this immensely underwhelming icon are odd too. They’re the kind of tones you’d associate with handbags or perfumes. Maybe that was the intent. But if so, why?
The iconic ‘leaper’ does make an appearance, but at the moment only as part of a ‘maker’s mark’ stamp design, which confuses the silhouette and reduces its impact. I have a feeling that they’re going to try and say the lines add horizontal speed and dynamism to the graphic, but in reality it just muddies an iconic shape. It’s also another instance where they’ve said they want to keep things minimal and contemporary, but then add needless embellishments.
Naturally, there will be a design rationale statement that justifies all of these decisions. But I know from experience that, more often than not, the reality is that the senior figure who had final sign-off probably just wanted things a certain way. Usually because that’s what they personally like, not necessarily because it’s the best solution for the brand. And then the poor copywriter has to backwards engineer a rationale to fit so it can be sold in to the board.
Whatever the case, this is not the visual identity of a luxury car manufacturer. It’s an identity suitable for supermarket own brand lipstick. Or knock off handbags bought from a street vendor in Benidorm. It certainly doesn’t say boutique luxury. Looking at it alongside its brands Jaguar would probably like to see as peers in the space (Breitling, Aston Martin, Louis Vuitton, Rolex, Porsche, Bottega Veneta), you can see a clear differential, and it’s not a good one.
The whole tone and style is reminiscent, not of a luxury car manufacturer, but of the pompous, high fashion brands that Zoolander was mocking almost a quarter of a century ago. If Timothée Chalamet appeared at the end earnestly looking into the camera and whispering “Copy Nothing, the new fragrance from Jaguar” you wouldn’t bat an eyelid.
It’s telling that, when you look at the identities of high-end luxury brands, there’s really nothing else that looks like this. Uniqueness in a market is often a very good thing, but that’s not necessarily the case here. Why? Because there are plenty of brand and product identities that it does resemble. And those are generally mass-produced, mass-market, everyday brands and products. Playmobil, Indesit, Smart, the Kia Picanto, the Chrysler Neon… Not a good look at all.
It’s all very derivative, passé and more than a little try hard. You know, like that chap at the office with the wacky ties and the “you don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps” mug. Yeah. Him.
Some people on social media have been declaring the rebrand a work of genius and a “masterstroke” because everyone is talking about it. But not all attention is good. If the world is pointing and laughing but hardly anyone buys your product, then all that attention really didn’t benefit the company or the brand in any meaningful way at all, did it?
But surely this newly revitalised Jaguar will shift product, right?
For a more upmarket, fully EV Jaguar, the obvious competition will be Polestar, Porsche, Mercedes, Audi, BMW, possibly even Aston Martin. Will buyers to walk past all of those brands and choose Jaguar? It seems a hard sell, especially with such a divisive brand rejig and more than 20 years of product stagnation and an ever-worsening reputation in regard to reliability and customer service.
Coming back to the branding, this is where the classic Jaguar values of ‘Grace, space and pace’ would be perfect. What could be more fitting for a high-end EV, than a blend of smooth, sinuous styling, the kind Jaguar have long excelled at, married to a dynamic yet cosseting ride, luxuriously appointed cabin and heaps of power. It fits the brief perfectly, pulling in younger buyers who probably aren’t aware of the statement’s link to the brand, while offering more traditional buyers a clear through-line to the marque’s heritage. If they’ve truly walked away from that, it feels like a huge opportunity missed.
Of course, the issue was never the brand identity, it was always the product. To rescue an ailing brand, first you have to create an excellent product and start winning back consumer confidence.
There are heaps of examples from the last three decades or so in the automotive space.
Skoda was a punchline for many a “skip” gag in the 80s and 90s, by the late 00s they were the go-to brand for high quality, affordable and well designed cars. The key? Great product, marketing that had wide appeal and keen pricing. No major identity rebrand needed, just a gradual shift in perception and visual identity as the higher quality product became more evident.
Dacia was a running joke on Top Gear for a number of seasons, and a brand looked at in the same way as Proton or Perodua. Now they’re everywhere. Why? Again: great products, excellent customer service and reliability, clever marketing with broad appeal and keen pricing. The branding has adapted and refined over the last 15 years as it’s nudged slightly up-market.
Few realise how close Porsche came to going bump in the 90s. What saved them? The Cayenne, the Boxster and the Panamera. Products they never would have considered building previously. But they marketed with the full weight of the brand’s history and cachet behind them, cleverly tying them in to the legendary 911 and their motorsport heritage. Quality remained superb and pricing was good (although its risen over the years). The result? Well it used to be an event to see a Porsche. Now they’re everywhere, and the company is booming. No major rebrand needed.
Volvo had a dull reputation for being “boxy but good”, chugging along making worthy, reliable, safe, robust family transport. The kind of car someone buys when they don’t care about cars and certainly not an aspirational brand. But then they launched the S80, XC90, XC60 and XC40. Over a 20 year period their reputation went from decent but dull to brilliantly designed, desirable, luxurious and well built, while maintaining their reputation for safety and sublime ride. How? They made brilliant products, and then they marketed them honestly with a clear message. No major rebrand needed, just a gradual shift in perception driven by product quality.
Bentley is another example of great product revitalising an ailing brand. Prior to the VW Group acquisition and the launch of the Continental GT in 2003, it seemed as if Bentley was doomed. For all their heritage and racing pedigree, the cars were simply not good enough or attractive enough to keep the company going long-term. By focussing on quality, ensuring every customer had a fantastic experience, leaning into their heritage and hugely improving the company’s overall offering, VW not only turned Bentley around, but it’s now one of the most aspirational brands in the world. Again, it was all about the product, no significant rebrand required.
New product lines like Lexus and Polestar have done well because the ownership experience is brilliant – they’ve garnered a reputation for building reliable vehicles that are deeply satisfying to own.
Get the product wrong and no amount of branding work – clever or otherwise – will save you. Just look at British Leyland, Saab, Rover, GM or some parts of the Stellantis group right now for evidence of that. The old phrase in marketing is “sell the sizzle, not the sausage”, but if the sausage gives you food poisoning then no-one’s coming back for another.
There will be no new Jaguar products to buy until 2026 at least, and the vehicle they will be revealing on December 2nd is a prototype – effectively a concept car that will illustrate the design language of Jaguar models in the future. Make no mistake, the next two weeks are critical moment for the future of the company.
Jaguar MD Rawdon Glover is predicting that “80-90% of the upcoming models’ audience will be first-time Jaguar buyers”. For any product, in any market at any time, expecting your heritage brand to appeal to an almost entirely new demographic overnight is hugely ambitious. It’s not impossible, but it’s incredibly difficult. You basically have to d everything perfectly, and even then there are no guarantees – both the market and the court of public opinion are fickle and mercurial things.
Another factor to consider is that this new range, when it eventually lands, will be completely EV and at least twice as expensive as the current range. So you’re looking at an introductory price of £100,000 or more. Probably more than that by the time the vehicles actually go on sale.
Moving into this price bracket is bold to say the least. It’s far too rich for the average ‘fashionable urban young thing’ that they seem to be targeting. After all, how many trendy 20-30 somethings do you know that can afford to drop more than £100,000 on a luxury EV these days? We live in a time when huge chunks of the populace are still living with family or in houses of multiple occupancy well into their 30s. And more and more urbanites are eschewing cars altogether in favour of public transport and cycling.
By drawing a line under everything that has gone before and declaring it irrelevant, whatever existing stock of vehicles is remaining at Jaguar and their dealerships has now, to all intents and purpose, been disowned as old hat. People will begin to worry about support for these vehicles in the future, so they effectively become white elephants. Who’s going to buy them now? You’d have to be stark raving mad to buy an i-Pace or F-Pace now.
Of course, it could well be that, on December 2nd when we finally get to see the new vehicle design language in its entirety and full context, we’re astounded by a phenomenal product. I hope that’s the case.
My confidence isn’t high though, as someone on Threads said the other day (apologies for not remembering who said this), “the fish rots from the head”. If JLR misunderstand their own offering and customer base this badly, and genuinely think that what’s been created here is ground-breaking and game-changing, then I fear for the product. Because if management signed this junk off, then goodness only knows what the vehicle design language will look like.
We’ve had a sneak preview, by way of a a couple of abstract detail shots and some “spy” shots. The “spy” shots show what appears to be a large form GT car, under heavy disguise. If the proportions are accurate, it would appear to be quite a traditional long-bonnet, cab-back coupé, in the form of the Continental GT or Rolls-Royce Wraith.
Should the new car take this form, I think Jaguar are cooked. A brand refresh and move to EV powertrains would be the perfect opportunity to continue the sterling work started by the i-Pace and rethink the entire form of luxury vehicles. If it’s just another big wheelbase coupé with a pointlessly long front and comparatively small cabin (both unnecessary compromises with an EV platform), then it would be a gigantic own goal.
I hope I’m wrong. As I said, I love Jaguar and think it deserves a proper, sympathetic reinvention. I want it to have plenty of success selling incredible products. But on the evidence of what I’ve seen this week, I’m worried. I’m really, really worried.
Man, I hope I’m wrong.
References
https://media.jaguar.com/news/2024/11/fearless-exuberant-compelling-jaguar-reimagined-0
https://www.aiga.org/what-is-design/
https://www.designweek.co.uk/jaguar-attempts-to-pounce-on-the-future-with-major-rebrand/