OMG Jaguar What Have You Done?!

Jaguar’s rebrand is… interesting to say the least.

So what does Jaguar say to you? ‘60s getaway car? ‘70s crash fodder in The Sweeney? So thirsty they had two tanks? Morse? Ford parts bin? Sold to India?

To me Jaguar is about sporting heritage and British racing green. Big engines, straight 6s, V12s, the big cat, the E-Type, a bit of luxury, wood and well-loved leather, wire wheels.

But this latest rebranding fiasco is… not Jaguar.

Sure, it’s all catwalk, London Fashion Week, some sort of surreal fever dream, but it really is not Jaguar any more. Yes, you can lose your stuffy tweed jackets and leather elbows, but there was a nugget of Britishness in there that seems to now be… utterly discarded.

Forget my London reference, it’s more Milan, actually, it’s Girl from Mars.

It’s like the marketing team have looked at the brand, found all the nuggets that epitomise its soul rather than its at times chaotic path, and gone in completely the opposite direction. Just to say that they have.

I don’t get the fashion thing, I’m not a fashionista and I would hazard a guess that 99% of people could give a hoot either So is that what this about the target market is the 1%?

Good luck with that. Jaguar risks losing all brand loyalty with this path and that means having to start all over again I’ve not heard one person utter a good word about this rebrand, but then I mix in the circles of people who have owned or still own a Jag.

“Copy nothing” they say

“Create exuberant” was another message

“Live vivid” was another

“Delete ordinary” and “break moulds” were two more.

“Do you sell cars?” said Tesla boss Elon Musk.

I may be overreacting, it may just be a knee-jerk reaction. Maybe I’m just too old, and have seen so much of Jaguar’s DNA that this is a test-tube baby?

I thought Jaguar were getting there again with the F-Type (I really wanted one) and the F-Pace. But alas it’s less Lewis Hamilton and more Jean-Paul Gaultier. Not that I’m dissing the Frenchman one jot, but this is cars not capes.

As for the “all electric” drive, if you’ll pardon the pun, that’s not happening. I’m not being negative at all, it’s a fact – There are not enough electric chargers for all the cars that are expected to body-snatch the petro-diesel dominance of the past 100 years. I’d love to support it but the infrastructure isn’t there and I don’t see it being so in the next five years.

Then there’s the partial pastel Henry Ford moment “You can have it any colour you like, as long as it’s pink. Or baby blue.” I think “new Jaguar” are painting themselves in a corner here after wildly saying “break moulds” and shoving dayglo in our faces before limiting the palette to the binary colours of a new-born’s romper suit.

“Don’t like it” Andy from Little Britain would say, and maybe I’m small-minded and need to be poked fun at too. But then these are supposed to be cars that people drive, “form follows function” and all that. I’ve never once seen the bollocks on the catwalk worn daily in the high street and this is England. Oh wait, there’s a global clientele, of course there is. Still don’t like it. Maybe the 1% will. Or not.