Jaguar: All Virtue, No Vehicle

Adverts aren’t what they used to be. Long gone are the days when Cindy Crawford sold us Pepsi, Nicole and Papa’s trysts encouraged us to join the Renault Clio club, and Nescafé’s Gold Blend couple convinced us that the best way to get it on with a neighbour was to ensure you were always out of coffee. Out of the Ark perhaps, but at least in those days you knew what you were getting for your money.

Fast forward to 2024, and in a crowded field for worst advert of all time, Jaguar is currently the odds-on favourite. The luxury car manufacturer set pulses into overdrive when it unleashed possibly the wokest rebrand in history. Instead of automotive, we were treated to a spectacle of social engineering. A coterie of androgenous United Colours of Benetton rejects flounced their way across the screen, purveying for us the full gamut of sulk. This was accompanied by various meaningless two-word phrases: “create exuberant,” “live vivid,” “delete ordinary,” and “break moulds.” While the DEI clipboard was undoubtedly never far from the director’s megaphone, there was no car in sight.

Lest we believe the emphasis on virtue rather than vehicle sales was a short-sighted error of judgement, we are reliably informed that 800 people had worked on the rebrand, which makes me seriously wonder whether irritation instead of inducement was actually the expressed aim of the campaign. Fortunately for Jaguar customers, the vomit-inducing cacophony of colours and non-sequiturs is unlikely to do much damage to their quality upholstery, but it may make them think twice about upgrading to the next model. “The art of performance” is Jaguar’s slogan—and performance it certainly was!

As an iconic British marque almost a century old, Jaguar’s latest advert would surely has the founders Lyons and Walmsley turning in their graves, alongside aficionados such as the late Queen, John ‘two jags’ Prescott, and, dare I say it, Inspector Morse. It’s also nothing less than a slap in the face for the brand’s customer base: middle-aged, middle-class men, whom the company seems to think are no longer worth courting.

The backlash was predictable and swift. It was led musketeer-like by X CEO Elon, who quipped, “Do you sell cars?” Jaguar replied increasingly cryptically, with comments like “We’re striking through the convention,” “Soon you’ll see things our way,” “The story is unfolding. Stay tuned,” and “A pivotal moment.”

While I personally have absolutely zero interest in cars (beyond the stipulation that they work), this image volte face is curious. It’s one thing for Bud Light to go the full Dylan Mulvaney (a billion dollar virtue signal gone wrong), but for a luxury car brand, surely closely wed to ‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchy,’ and even ‘evil capitalism,’ what exactly are they playing at?

For my money, there are only two options here: either the automotive giant is genuinely determined to sacrifice profit for political correctness, or sales are down. Scratching the surface, would suggest it is the latter.

Jaguar sales have been in freefall for years, leaving the company casting around for a new market. And with no new cars being sold in the UK until 2026 (at which point they’ll be all electric), clearly a positive spin was required. Here is Managing Director Rawdon Glover to help us out:

We need to change people’s perceptions of what Jaguar stands for. And that’s not a straightforward, easy thing to do. So having a fire break in between old and new is, actually, very helpful.

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. We need to re-establish our brand and at a completely different price point so we need to act differently. We wanted to move away from traditional automotive stereotypes.

Alongside the rebrand, Jaguar is going to drop petrol and diesel engines four years earlier than the government’s 2030 deadline—a move they expect will cost them 85% of their customers, especially with the hike in prices. But none of that seems to bother Santino Pietrosanti, the American marketing guru who masterminded the rebrand.

Speaking at the Attitude Awards last month, Pietrosanti explained the ideas behind the campaign:

At Jaguar we proudly stand with the LGBTQ+ community because we know that originality and creativity thrives in spaces where people are free to be themselves.

We’re passionate about our people and we’re committed to fostering a diverse inclusive and unified culture that is representative of not only the people who use our products but in a society in which we all live.

A culture where our employees can bring their authentic selves to work. And we are on a transformative journey of our own, driven by a belief in diversity, inclusion, creativity, policy, and most importantly action.

It’s marvelous stuff, isn’t it?!

Most interesting for me was Jaguar’s response to the backlash. Faced with the predictable social media ridicule, Glover could have taken this as a sign that all was not well. Instead, he decided that the plebs were simply too bigoted to realise their own bad taste. He labelled the criticism “vile hatred and intolerance”—diversity, equality, and inclusion in all things of course, unless it means opinions you don’t like.

Jaguar aren’t the first (and they certainly won’t be the last) to bend the knee to progressivism. They could even be proved right in the long term. The market for ultra-rich, über-lefties is undoubtedly a growth industry; those for whom a £100k car is a small price to pay for boosting one’s socialist credentials. Just four days in, moreover, and the tweet has been viewed 160 million times. Not all of those views can be negative.

One thing PR gurus could improve on however, is their spiel. Jaguar was always renowned for excellence, and there is absolutely nothing inclusive or egalitarian about that. The purpose of a luxury brand is exclusivity – you’d think a marque as old as Jaguar might have worked that out.

Discovering your true self is of course important; temet nosce as they say. Call me old-fashioned however, but I’ll stick with caveat emptor next time I’m buying a new car.

Frank Haviland is the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West, and writes a Substack here.

This piece was first published in The European Conservative, and is reproduced by kind permission.

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