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Tens of thousands of people on social media are criticizing luxury automaker Jaguar’s new controversial rebranding, calling it confusing and out of touch with today’s consumers. The new ad campaign leaves out the main attraction—its new electric cars, and also ditches its iconic big cat logo.
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https://twitter.com/Jaguar/status/1858800846646948155
Some critics are also calling the company’s new creative philosophy too “woke.”
Jaguar defended the new advertising campaign, telling Fast Company: “Our brand relaunch . . . is a bold and imaginative reinvention, and as expected, it has attracted attention.”
Jaguar says it wanted to spark online debate to get people talking, and is encouraged by the huge interest and emotion the brand is evoking, all before it even shows its product.
It has certainly sparked debate, but unfortunately, much of it has been negative. One user on X wrote that “the damage this Jaguar marketing did to a once iconic brand should be studied . . . making an absolute mess of all the reputation capital #Jaguar built over decades.” On Bluesky, another joked that the Mad Men advertising agency “Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce would never do Jaguar like this.”
On Instagram, most of the comments responding to a post from Jaguar’s account are critical (“fire your whole marketing team for this”), while the top comment, “killed a British icon,” was liked more than 13,000 times, according to Forbes.
This is the biggest change in Jaguar’s history, a complete reinvention for the British classic car company, Jaguar Land Rover, a subsidiary of Tata Motors. And whether you like it or not, it’s definitely bold and ambitious. The branding overhaul comes as it prepares to go all-electric in 2026. (It has since stopped car production to prepare for the transition.)
The carmaker tells Fast Company that it will be unveiling the design concept for the electric vehicles at Miami Art Week early next month. And that’s no coincidence, as the target audience of EV buyers are among the luxury market and global jet-set crowd that flies to Miami each year for Art Basel. As Fast Company previously reported, the battery-electric fleet of vehicles will be about twice as expensive as its existing internal-combustion-engine models.