Jaguar's massive rebrand explained: what's all the fuss about?

Jaguar, a 102-year old British car company, has just revealed a new concept car. Nothing unusual there: car companies make eccentric models to preview their future metal all the time.

But what Jaguar’s up to has whipped up a massive, fiery online debate that’s spilled over into politics, evening news and the culture wars.

Here’s TopGear.com’s guide to what the heck’s going on, and what happens next.

WHAT’S HAPPENED?

On Tuesday 19 November 2024, Jaguar revealed its fresh ‘brand identity’. Long story short, it’s a new ‘monogram’ badge (a circle housing a ‘J’ and an ‘r’), a sort of Venetian blind leaping cat caged in a barcode, and ‘wordmark’ spelling ‘JaGUar’ in jumbled upper/lower case.

Meanwhile, Jaguar’s social media channels deleted their entire archives and posted a 30-second video that didn’t feature a single car. What it showed was a posse of non-plussed high fashion models posing in a lift and poncing about with a paintbrush and mallet in a children’s soft-play zone. Jaguar’s new mantra: to ‘copy nothing’ and ‘delete ordinary’ was writ large across the screen.

The reaction has been… well, ‘mixed’ would imply a decent smattering of positivity. You have to doomscroll until your thumb aches to find viewers who are legitimately pleased about Jaguar’s new font, or badge, or the Planet of the Androgynous.

Marketing guru Rory Sutherland has been interviewed, commenting “Jaguar cannot survive on a group of people who love the brand but don’t buy the cars". “F***ing lunacy” was the verdict from Marketing Week. Reform Party MP Nigel Farage has predicted Jaguar will go bust. Tesla boss Elon Musk asked Jaguar “Do you sell cars?” on X.

Columnists on all sides of the political spectrum have been busily machine-gunning their keyboards while umpteen ‘emergency podcasts’ have been screamed into the void. At least F1 grid walk legend Martin Brundle liked it, commenting: “I have no idea what this is all about, but it’s genius. Everyone is talking about Jaguar in a moment of time when they’re not actually making cars."

Forget ‘Lewis to Ferrari confirmed’ or the new BMW M5’s kerbweight. Welcome to the single biggest talking point in the car world this year.

WHY HAS IT HAPPENED?

The brand revamp seemed to blindside many, but it’s the tangible beginning of what Jaguar has been telegraphing for over a year: an unprecedented reset of its ailing operation. As of November 2024, no new Jaguars are in production for the first time since 1948. The company is in the midst of what it calls a ‘firebreak’ to create distance between its previous mainstream semi-premium guise, and its target of morphing into a Porsche and Bentley rival selling £100k ultra-lux EVs to a younger, more diverse ‘cash-rich, time-poor’ clientele.

On 3 December 2024, Jaguar revealed an outlandish concept car called the Type 00 which sets the tone for where it’s going next – a long way from XEs and E-Paces. It's bluff, angular, massive in scale and wantonly untraditional. And by the looks of this disguised prototype already testing at Jag HQ… it’s not just bluster for the cameras. Jag is going to make something wild.

So, the bosses needed to drum up anticipation for this: the biggest moment in Jaguar’s history this century. The confusing, controversial, purist-upsetting brand campaign has been almost too successful – unless you truly believe that all publicity is indeed good publicity. Fact is, most people weren’t talking about Jaguar last month, or even last week. They are now. Quite a lot of them are shouting.

WHY ARE PEOPLE SO ANGRY?

At the time of writing the YouTube video has had over two million views. The Instagram reel has been seen 6.9 million times and the commenter sentiment across all social media channels is overwhelmingly negative.

The word ‘woke’ (and ‘go woke go broke’) has been bandied about just as much as the phrase ‘RIP Jaguar’. People were confused about the lack of a car, irritated by Jaguar ‘fixing’ a badge that people didn’t seem to think was broken, and enraged by the deletion of all previous social media posts. Had Jaguar erased its history?

There’s a theme in the responses: that Jaguar embodies the car industry at its most traditional. Caddish, classically pretty cars that drive well, and yes, are often unreliable and behind the times tech-wise. But hey, that’s all part of their character.

Jaguar made its name in the Fifties and Sixties, winning Le Mans and building cars that could outpace Ferrari and Aston Martin for a quarter of the price. That gave Jags the aura of an underdog. The E-Type was beautiful, but a bargain. So was the XK120. The Mk2 was equally happy being a bank job getaway car or racer as it was wafting about politicians and royalty.

Even when Jaguar went radical – with cars like the XJS coupe – they were still festooned with leather, wood and forty-seven ounces of raffish laid-back charm. And so it went on. The all-aluminium early-2000s XJ was a spaceship dressed in tweed. The I-Pace beat Audi, BMW and Mercedes to open the premium electric SUV market… but it was still pretty. And drove better than any of its rivals then or now.

People who love Jags love Jag the way it’s always been. That stout Britishness with a debonair sense of humour and an effortless Saville row style. The ‘Jaaaag’ factor that was behind the ultra-suave ‘Good To Be Bad’ ad campaign, which seductively tapped into the ‘baddies drive Jags’ vibe with the likes of Mark Strong, Tom Hiddleston and Sir Ben Kingsley failing to outshine a raucous F-Type V8. The new-look Jag vision almost appears ashamed of all that.

Plus, Jaguar’s top brass haven’t apologised: they’ve doubled down. The official Instagram account has been replying to open-mouthed viewers with pure sass, while Jaguar boss Rawdon Glover told the Financial Times: “If we play in the same way that everybody else does, we'll just get drowned out. So we shouldn't turn up like an auto brand.” He also decried the ‘anti-woke’ reaction as “vile hatred and intolerance".

DID JAGUAR NEED TO DO THIS?

Well isn’t that the £90,000 (before options) question? After all, if Jaguar is so loved, why bother with an expensive rebrand? It has heritage the Chinese newcomers would kill for, and you’re more likely to let one out into traffic than an Audi.

Why move the next generation of cars out of the reach of most people who could afford the current ones? Why go electric as the whole EV transition stumbles amid high energy prices, eye-watering depreciation and stuttering Net Zero targets?

Here’s the nasty truth that’s been lost in the storm of vitriol: Jaguar doesn’t sell enough cars. Not just at the moment: it hasn’t been consistently profitable for years. Decades.

CEOs come and go. Parent brands change. And Jaguar changes tack… but it never makes money. In the last financial year JLR sold 58,000 Range Rovers, 28,700 Defenders, and just 13,528 Jaguars in total. It’s not just a recent slump either.

In the last decade Jaguar pitched itself as a rival to Audi, BMW and Mercedes. But even in its peak year of 2019, annual sales topped out at just over 610,000 – less than two-thirds the stated goal of one million. At best, for every single Jaguar XE customer, there were six BMW 3 Series buyers.

WHERE HAS JAGUAR BEEN GOING WRONG?

Before the recent mass-market ‘let’s challenge BMW and Audi’ era (which brought us two saloons, a wagon, two SUVs, a sports car, one limo and an EV) there was the retro era: when the S-Type and X-Type harked back to Jag’s buxom heyday styling.

Even going up against Bangle’s controversial BMWs back when Lexus was exclusively for your dad’s golf instructor’s grandad… they bombed. And Jaguar was crucified for looking stuck in the past.

Through the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. Jaguar had brief highs. It won Le Mans in ’88 and ’90. The mid-Nineties XK was much-admired. But the marque was more often than not derided for poor reliability and dismal aftersales service. Hindsight is very kind to Jaguar.

Take the XJ220: now revered as one of the greatest Nineties supercars. Upon its launch, it was criticised for its size, weight, and ditching the concept car’s naturally-aspirated V12 for the twin-turbo V6 out of a Metro rally car. And guess what? Deposits haemorrhaged and production was ceased early.

DIDN’T JAGUAR ALREADY TRY GOING ELECTRIC?

You might think Jaguar already had an electric standard-bearer with the I-Pace, but that was also a financial black hole. Jaguar had to pay Austrian contractor Magna Steyr to make it for them. Not good: EVs have thin profit margins and Jag lacked the financial clout to offer tasty lease deals. The C-X75 hybrid hypercar was cancelled so it didn’t make a loss. The Formula E support series featuring I-Paces only lasted two awkward seasons.

And meanwhile in V8 land, Jag invented a racing series to shift Project 8 supersaloons… which never happened. The F-Type, held aloft by the critics as the quintessential core of Jag’ness, was outsold four to one over its 11-year life by the Porsche 911.

SO WHERE DOES THIS REBRAND LEAVE JAGUAR NOW?

The painful truth is that due to a lack of R&D budget, it’s been a very long time since Jaguar made a roundly class-leading car. Handsome and good-to-drive is usually a given, but in the main the cars haven’t been able to mount a serious challenge to the German and Japanese hegemony, now being challenged by Korea and China. Having already tried being retro, being a mass-market German rival and being a low-volume alternative, it feels like a re-invention into ‘EV-only boutique’ is its last roll of the dice.

However, Jaguar has riled up a LOT of people who clearly love and care about it in the process. Those people feel abandoned, like Jaguar no longer wants their business, or is even actively trying to shun them.

Question is, how many of said Jag traditionalists actually bought their cars? And if enough of them did consistently, would JaGUar even be considering such a risky reset?

WHEN WILL WE KNOW IF JAGUAR’S REBRAND WORKED?

It could be the disruptive marketing play of the century. Or a deep hole to dig out of. 

Our next clue is the Type 00 concept car itself: a long, low coupe in the classic Jaguar sense... except it's electric. And pink. And has butterfly doors and a strangely robotic face. The concept is proving divisive as you'd expect, but people are indeed talking about Jaguar again.

What's more, insiders insist this isn't one of those concept cars which are a designer's fantasy but bear no relation to the street legal car with wheel clearance and actual visibility that will follow on next year. We're told that a Type 00, plus a couple more doors, is pretty much what's headed for production. We'll believe that when we see it, but either way the future of Jaguar looks very bold indeed. And that, like it or not, was probably necessary this time.