Reactions to the teaser (if that’s the word) for a ‘new’ Jaguar floated on X continue to pile up.
Well, reactions to the teaser (if that’s the word) for a “new” Jaguar floated on X continue to pile up. It has attracted 87,000 comments (not, uh, all of them positive) at the time of writing, and been viewed 102 million times.
There’s a famous line in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Grey:
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
Not always.
In my earlier post on the Jaguar teaser, I wrote that it was a “ a small reminder, in its own way, that the corporate managerial class (see also ESG, HR, etc.) does not always have the shareholder uppermost in its mind.”
As more emerges about the thinking in Jaguar, the more likely that seems to be the case. To be fair, the company faced a problem, as the Daily Telegraph’s Ed Cumming explains:
Sales are in free fall, down 70 per cent in the US in the past five years. In the UK, the brand has drifted into irrelevance, a byword for a certain kind of reactionary middle-aged man.
What?
(Full disclosure: I don’t own a Jaguar, or any car: Living in Manhattan and all that.)
Cumming:
The criticism from Musk will sting because he is a huge part of the problem. Jaguar moved from competing with luxury cars, like Aston Martin, to going up against Audi and BMW for business-class electric models. Then Tesla came along and blew them all out of the water. A series of missteps have left Jaguar caught in no-man’s land between past and future and running out of options. The advert feels less like a rebrand and more like a final grim-eyed throw of the dice.
I think that may be too charitable. It may well be that Jaguar (which is ultimately owned by India’s Tata Group) realized that it had a problem. But, unless I am very much mistaken, to believe that this particular reimagining (which also involves turning Jaguar into a luxury brand of which the car is just one part) is the answer is delusionary. And the best explanation for it is the epistemic blindness so typical of much of the modern managerial caste, connected, I reckon, with a highly expansive view of what it is they are meant to be doing.
A few years ago, I wrote about this sort of thing in the course of an article about Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever. He had told the Financial Times:
Expectations of business leaders have changed dramatically. When I was a young executive, the chief executive was expected to deliver increased profits, happy shareholders and more jobs.
Today, staff and customers believe you should embody the company’s values and speak out on big, touchstone issues, from race to fake news and climate change.
I had my doubts about that then, and I still do. And so far as the staff are concerned, who cares? They are paid by the company, which is to say (in the end), by the company’s shareholders (or in the case of shares held by institutional shareholders, those institutions’ clients), As a rule, shareholders continue to expect maximized risk-adjusted return, and many of them now realize that that is not something that ESG is going to deliver. “Big touchstone issues” will be something that they deal with in places other than their stock portfolio.
In a recent speech, Santino Pietrosanti, a director of Jaguar UK (where he is “responsible for delivering and optimising the Jaguar product vision and portfolio, strategy and brand roadmap for the UK”), said that Jaguar was “committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive, and unified culture that is representative not only of the people who use our products but of the society in which we all live.”
To be sure, Pietrosanti was speaking at an awards ceremony “powered by Jaguar,” where this sort of thing might have been expected to have been said, and he was reportedly not directly involved with the teaser. But he has backed it, writing on LinkedIn:
It’s bold. It’s fearless. It’s exuberant. It’s everything a Jaguar should be. As we look forward, Jaguar will recapture originality as it’s core and shift it to an all-new space where it can be truly unique. Jaguar doesn’t need to copy anything – we copy nothing. Our symbols of change will make this clear – a new device mark, new tone and image.
Comments have been switched off.
In his speech, Pietrosanti said that Jaguar was on a “transformative journey” driven by a “belief in diversity, inclusion, creativity, policy and, most importantly, action.” The action did not appear to be focused on profitability (but, again, consider the nature of the event). Pietrosanti explained that 15 DEI groups had been established. The company had held its second annual global DEI summit. Ten thousand employees from around the globe had attended.
These are not words to make a shareholder rejoice. They raise once again the question of what today’s management class believe that a company is for. They suggest that the changes to Jaguar’s image may owe as much to a sense of ideological mission than to concern over deteriorating sales. The old, reprehensibly macho Jaguar had finally to be put to rest.
That may be how to explain the junking of its growling cat, and its replacement by a bland new design. The new logo JaGUar is not some pastiche of blackmailer’s cut and paste, but “seamlessly blended upper and lower case characters in visual harmony.”
Oh.
Also writing in the Telegraph, Matthew Lynn writes that whatever one might think about relaunching Jaguar as an electric vehicle, it should not mean “abandoning the energy and verve that the Jaguar brand stood for.” But what if that energy and that verve have become, as the scolds say, “problematic?”
Lynn:
One of the secrets of Tesla’s success has been that it understands that EVs still need to be upmarket, desirable cars, unashamed of their speed and power, which you can show off to your friends.
This would surely have been the moment for Jaguar to double down on its heritage. It could have reassured everyone that while the kit under the bonnet might have changed, elsewhere the new range was every bit as stylish as the cars it had been making for the last hundred years.
Instead, it chucked it all in the bin, as if it was something to be embarrassed about instead of celebrated.
But what if some of Jaguar’s management were embarrassed by that heritage?
In Lynn’s view, it “was always going to be a struggle for the new Jags to compete with the likes of BYD and Geely as well as Tesla — but with this weak, insipid branding, it may well prove impossible.”
Cumming:
Perhaps the world is full of 26-year-olds who would love to cash in their Bitcoin for a Jag if only it embraced wokery more enthusiastically. But I doubt it. Customers hate being patronised. The panic that steams off this advert does not inspire confidence.
Pass the New Coke.
Or watch this Jaguar commercial from 1999. Song by Etta James.
Or this one. Song by Chris Isaak. You know which one.
Good times. Gone times.