► Six months after Jaguar’s rebrand
► What does Jaguar think of the reception?
► What’s next in the big rebrand strategy?
Incredibly it’s been six months since Jaguar revealed its new look, and with it the Type 00 concept. A technicolour nuke to everything that’d come before, it reimagines the marque with very different look and feel.
‘What we set out to signal that the brand was changing,’ heavily understates Nick White, director of communications at Jaguar, talking to me at the Monaco round of the Formula E championship. Already a showcase for new technology, the all-electric series is now the perfect platform to continue Jaguar’s rebrand. JLR had a huge presence at this year’s round, with a pontoon showcasing its Type 00 concept just metres from the track.
‘It takes three to five years to transform brands,’ White tells me on the Jaguar team’s yacht ‘and we’re very early in that journey.’ Things kicked off in dramatic style in November, with a campaign devised by JLR and consultancy firm Accenture Song – but the whole process will take half a decade in total.
‘When we set up our reimagined strategy in 2021, we wanted to keep the new and old apart,’ White explains. The initial launch was designed to disrupt, defy and reinvent Jaguar as an exciting, all-electric premium brand. Think of it as the new Bentley for techy millionaires and you’re pretty much there. The format for this marketing Ctrl+Alt+Del was a visually punchy advert and the launch of a bold new design language.
To that end, the bold Type 00 concept was shown alongside the new campaign and it previewed production four-door GT that’ll riff off the same design language. After that, we’ll probably get a couple of SUVs because that’s where the volume and profit is.
Even though it’s a crucial pillar to Jaguar’s ongoing reinvention, the marketing power of Formula E feels like a drop in the ocean compared to the seismic effect of the reset that took place around half a year before.
‘We had an incredible reaction,’ says White, rounding up the positive, negative and at times deeply worrying reactions the campaign generated. However, in numeric terms and eyeballs reached, the campaign was a huge success and overwhelmingly positive.
‘We had nearly a billion impressions on PR, on social media, OTS (opportunity to see) and social impressions – and we spent pretty much nothing on marketing,’ he says. ‘If you said to me in early November, we were going to be the most talked about brand in the world for six weeks I’d have laughed.’
Brands will do anything they can to remain in the public eye and for six weeks JLR and Accenture Song were able to drag Jaguar out of the doldrums and onto front pages, smartphone alerts and social posts. They weren’t all positive – but the phrase ‘no such thing as bad publicity’ was surely made for situations such as these.
Or was it? Interestingly, just days after our chat, new reports suggest Jaguar wasn’t satisfied with its rebranding campaign and is looking for a new consultancy firm to partner with.
With the fallout, or momentum – depending on your opinion – of the rebrand still in full swing, Jaguar is now embarking on a world tour via Formula E with its new brand and concept.
‘We see it as a good way to amplify the brand,’ says White of the series. He’s right, of course; the Jaguar team won the Constructor’s title last year, with both its drivers in a shout of the Drivers’ title until the last round. ‘It brings us to another audience, a younger audience, a more digitally connected audience, and that’s important to us as well.’
The thinking is simple: find a new audience, show them the brand’s new look, and learn how to supercharge interest in each market. It’s preparation and homework for when the first production car is revealed.
‘We talk about China, where luxury customers are in their early 30s, and they spend their life on WeChat,’ White adds. ‘You’ve got around a billion views a day on WeChat. We’re learning how you take the main strategy and tailor it to the market in terms of the messaging and the media mix.’
Curtis Moldrich is CAR magazine’s Digital Editor and has worked for the brand for the past five years. He’s responsible for online strategy, including CAR’s website, social media channels such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, and helps on wider platform strategy as CAR magazine branches out on to Apple News+ and more.
By Curtis Moldrich
CAR's Digital Editor, F1 and sim-racing enthusiast. Partial to clever tech and sports bikes