If you have not yet overdosed on the news about the rebranding of a strange little car company called Jaguar, first of all, congratulations. Second of all, it ain’t stopping anytime soon!

On November 19, 2024, the internet officially broke. Jaguar, the car company that signifies ‘Britishness’ just as much as Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Prince Harry do, is not, just like those respective entities, British-owned anymore. In a delicious case of irony, a giant conglomerate from a former colony, Tata, now owns it.

I am a Gen Xer and have been reading car magazines since the mid-eighties. For approximately 40 years, I have been reading that Jaguar is under ‘crisis.’ It has changed ownership many times, from British Leyland to Ford and now Tata.

You see, for the past few decades, whenever Jaguar managed to sell 20,000 cars per year, it was a good year. While it always aspired to be the quintessentially British rival to the German triumvirate of Mercedes, BMW and Audi, not to mention East Asian contenders like Lexus, it struggled to sell enough cars to stay afloat. It did create a splash with some models when they first launched, but then that splash turned into bad press due to notorious reliability issues.

The insistence to remain British, which meant restricting design and manufacturing within the country, meant that not even Ford or Tata could really fix the company.

If that sounds like a harsh judgement, it is not: it is just business! There is a reason that no British-owned mass-market car brands exist today. The high costs, questionable labour expertise, and labour conditions are vastly different from those of major markets like mainland Europe, the US and China, all of which meant that the Jaguar remained beautiful, traditional and flawed.

There are bright spots. The Jaguar XJ has been the traditional ride of successive prime ministers of the UK, though that, as a brand association, is even more questionable than Jaguar’s own! Jaguar launched the I-Pace, their first-ever all-electric SUV, in 2018 and it has remained a steady seller. The I-Pace won a lot of awards and also serves as Waymo’s (formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project) vehicle of choice for its autonomous driving project but it is set to be discontinued in 2025.

And that brings us to, perhaps, the most startling realisation of all: Perhaps there was no other way!

The rebrand, universally panned, launched with a new wordmark that featured a thin, sans serif font and a flamboyant ad featuring garish colours, weird soulless faces, and a very on-the-nose attempt to court gender diversity advocates. It looked more like a high-fashion purveyor than an automobile manufacturer. Countless memes and parodies followed. Elon Musk famously asked Jaguar on X, “Do you sell cars?”

However, to give credit where it is due: Jaguar has been a good sport about it. For better or for worse, they are owning the campaign. They are firing back playful responses to the criticism.

Their main message is, “Bear with us – it will all make sense in the end.”

The campaign is seen as ‘woke’ and ‘liberal’ by many people, and that has resulted in the most interesting reaction. The advertisements by Volvo and Apple are two examples where their products are showcased as instruments for strengthening family. The backlash to the Jaguar campaign is latching on to these ads to celebrate them; never mind that ads are not made overnight, and these must have been planned months in advance to capitalise on the feel-good vibes around the Christmas season.

Jaguar has been in the doldrums for decades. Their latest campaign is a big, rude gesture to all of us: it is saying that perhaps if we had bought enough of their cars, they would not have had to jump off the deep end like this. Alternatively, it may be a genius move deliberately designed to get people talking. And guess what? It may have worked!

People who didn’t know or remember that Jaguar existed are now talking about it. They are talking about its storied past, its tradition, its Britishness and its identity. Even the ads that are being celebrated as the antithesis of this campaign are seen in their context. In other words, family-friendly ads from Volvo are reminding people of the fact that Jaguar exists and is set to launch a new range of cars.

Speaking of, the bitter truth is that Jaguar’s automobiles have been non-competitive and famous for all the wrong reasons for the longest time. The brand itself, in fact, has maintained its mystique and reputation; it is something that people love to praise and get nostalgic about, even if their wallets say otherwise.

It is fair to say that the new campaign and rebrand have captured global imagination and attention like no Jaguar vehicle ever could. What looks, sounds and feels like a psychedelic nightmare is, in fact, a marketing dream come true.

Talha bin Hamid is an accountant by profession, a reader, writer, public speaker, poet, trainer and geek by passion.
talhamid@gmail.com