Really, Jaguar?

For the last couple of days, I’ve been preoccupied with two rebranding efforts. The first one you haven’t heard about, which is the hacking of my LinkedIn account. Somewhat amusingly, this briefly saw my identity change to that of a German woman with an enviable career in fashion design. I have no idea what the dark-web’s motivation was with this caper but please people – update your passwords, even on the sites you don’t really care about.

The other rebranding effort you may have heard of is Jaguar. If stories about this rebrand have made it to your feed, it’s likely for the wrong reasons. The troll-y side of the internet is tediously criticizing this work for being woke, but I won’t let them take away my right to criticize it for just being questionable rebranding. At this point you should look at the film that accompanied the relaunch if you haven’t seen it.

Well, what did you think? You may be wondering how they forgot to show cars in their car brand rebranding, but they didn’t forget, there are no cars to show you. That’s right, Jaguar doesn’t have a new car to show you and won’t for a year or more, while they completely retool their lines from ICE vehicles to EVs. Instead, this rebranding is about a bold vision for where the company is going…

Create exuberant
Live vivid
Delete ordinary
Break moulds
Copy nothing

They say that all attention is good attention. But of course, we know there is bad attention, and if I was pressed to define it, I think it might look something like this. What is intended to be unique and striking, appears remarkably generic and unintentionally hilarious.

Apparently, Jaguar has a bit of a relevance challenge. It had long ago lost its luster as an innovative car maker and its moves down-market had even called into question its status as a luxury brand. At a point when other brands might be calling it a career (think Oldsmobile), Jaguar’s owner Tata is committed to saving this storied brand (and I’m guessing large financial incentives from the UK government probably played a role, but admittedly I haven’t bothered to look that up).

So, it’s time to wipe the slate clean and let Jaguar be evaluated on the boldness of its vision and the quality of its vehicles. Not the vehicles it has made for the last 50 years, which I understand were rife with quality issues. But its new, as yet imaginary vehicles, that involve completely new capabilities to design, manufacture and keep on the road. What could go wrong?

The heart of this rebranding is a new visual identity. While I am not a designer, that has never stopped me from having an opinion about design. A key promise of the refreshed brand is to “copy nothing”, so of course the first act of the new brand was to ignore that with its identity. What do all successful EV brands need? Why a symmetrical wordmark of course (see logos). There are no dangly bits in their names that would mistake them for an old-school brand still powered by dinosaur juice. The dangly bits are technically called “descenders” – think lower-case “g” or “j”.

So how did Jaguar’s rebrand move to a lower-case font and still stay in their symmetrical box? They just kept the capital “G” and added a story about how it alludes to how the name is pronounced. Ah, chef’s kiss to you still-symmetrical Jaguar.

If my analysis of this rebranding sounds a bit cynical, I think that’s kind of on brand with what Jaguar appears to be doing. While the imagery is probably intended to say, “we’re a bold, confident disrupter”, what I’m really hearing is, “please don’t forget about us while we go off for a while and figure out how to make electric cars”.

Anyway, as I learned this weekend, it’s a little scary when circumstances force you to rebrand, so I genuinely wish Jaguar well.