Jaguar Cars rebranding without any cars | Hacker News Reader

Jaguar Cars rebranding without any cars

jaguarusa.com

28 pointsbigtones39 comments

For some context;

- Jaguar competes in the same demographic that Audi, BMW and Mercedes go head to head in

- Jaguar merged with Land Rover about a decade ago, and the JLR group as a whole is doing pretty well; mostly aided by the Land Rover Defender and Range Rovers

- JLR is owned by Tata Motors

Jaguar over the past year or so has pivoted to aggressively pursuing an electric-only strategy, going all in - to the surprise of many by stopping production of all its ICE vehicles by 2025 at which point it’s aiming to start introducing its electric lineup.

Their sales were always minuscule compared the German 3, and this is their strategy to differentiate themselves.

Between the JLR group, and parents Tata, they have the knowledge and funding to pull this off, the only question is how long with Tata/JLR pursue losses for - they’re not driven by short term profits here so I’m somewhat optimistic.

Jaguar did launch the i-Pace a few years ago which was excellent, just ahead of its time and priced out for most.

This is not going to end well. They YouTube video comments are brutal. At least they're 'copying nothing' from other car brands I guess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMnYpL0GQfA

I guess on the flip side, how many of those comments are from anyone in Jaguar’s market? Jaguar is a luxury brand. It doesn’t seem dismissibly stupid for it to act like other luxury brands as opposed to Toyota.

Jaguar was a luxury brand. They lost their A-list status years ago.

Do they still position themselves as a luxury product? I know two people who own Jaguars, and they certainly treat them like luxury objects. (They were also probably buying high-end lines, if those existed at the time.)

> Jaguar is a luxury brand.

Jaguar is not a luxury brand

No one poor buys a new Jaguar. People who buy used jaguars do so in part for status.

Being a luxury brand isn’t anything to do with quality. Cadillac is a luxury brand and also not very good.

It's a brand for expensive products.

If it's copying anything it's the United Colours Of Benneton series of ads from the nineties.

I don't understand. It's a colorful extremely short Ad. What are people upset about? Car manufacturers made weird branding since forever, what's special about this one? Are people being upset about a car ad featuring people in "odd" clothing? Or that it doesn't feature a car in it? Does that somehow break their expectation about what a car branding ad should be?

I think the disconnect here is that I'm European and cad ads at least in northern/western Europe has for decades been about branding, not cars. A car ad could be 30 seconds long and feature a car for 1 second, the remaining time focusing on a girl playing with a cat (or whatever), the ad could often be featuring only women etc. As soon as I traveled to the US or southern/central/eastern Europe though, car ad videos were more obviously directly targeted at men, featuring the car for 90% of the video, if someone is driving in the ad it's a man, and having a deep male voice describe how great the car is. I think this is basically a northern European car ad, discovered by people in the US or elsewhere...

I wonder though what "what a stupid company" or "you just killed the brand" etc means? Literally, what are they implying? That someone would see an ad like this and NOT buy the car because of it because it smells too woke?

Most people simply have an expectation of cars, and specifically an attempt at better cars than the mediocre ones that motivated such a renewal and rebranding initiative.

The fairly strange brand image that this home page projects can be all over the spectrum from "bold" and a good fit for memorable advertisements to worse than New Coke; without cars it is impossible to tell, and this blindness is itself a very serious problem that adds to the lack of announcements of new products.

But this is the equivalent of showing a picture of a car under a black cloth and the text "coming soon". It has the date 2dec 2024. It's a teaser. Obviously there will be cars.

I somehow don't think all those angry youtube comments would have been equally angry if it was a video with trees. Or wild jaguars. I think they're upset about it being people with slightly norm-breaking woke-ish appearance. But I'm not sure, that's why I'm asking.

Its about selling out a whole society model and the brewing backlash to that going for lightning rods of "intelligent business behaviour damaging the emotional brand" .

I don't understand the society model thing. What model? And does that model exist in reality? I guess my question put more simply is: is this about a car brand being perceived as being "woke" or not?

I assume many are US people, used to half-assed tanks depicted as dark and manly road killers, being upset that a "car" can mean in other places something colorful and able to park on a small town street without blocking it.

>They YouTube video comments are brutal.

Why do you think Youtube removed the dislike counter?

Have you considered the possibility that the ad is deliberately intended to stir up controversy, putting the brand in people's minds and priming people to pay more attention when they actually launch the new car range?

Mass shootings also stir up controversies. That doesn't mean brands being associated with them would make for better sales.

their website looks shady too, like eu bag scam websites

Oh no, not the YouTube comments. If you ever need to sell a $70k car you have to satisfy the 16 year olds with a $50/week allowance. Otherwise you’ll never sell anything.

True. No one with money ever uses YouTube. Or posts on YouTube. Or makes car buying moneyfrom YouTube.

I've also never seen any car ads on YouTube because why would you bother advertising your brand to 16 year olds? They're just going to stay young and poor forever, we need to focus on marketing to wealthy adults who idolised our brand since they were kids...

Oh we’re trying to sell to one of the 100 influencers who make enough money to buy a car from YouTube, eh?

I suppose having no cars solves the reliability problems.

If "Break molds" is one of your mottos, having no cars is the inevitable outcome.

I'm super jarred that the new logotext is spelled "JaGUar"

If they are copying nothing, why does it make me think of 7-ELEVEn?

I thought it was JaGuar

Yeah I wasn't sure about the U myself either. Or the J for that matter

There's more on the new image here:

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/jaguar-reveals-n...

The new logo made me think of Slazenger.

Some pics of the 2026 prototypes https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/finally-first-pi...

I guess they are hoping to build buzz before the cars arrive?

Were there cars before?

(just kidding, I am actually a Jaguar fan, one out of maybe three remaining. Probably out of masochism!)

This feels like an avant- guard satire I’m not sophisticated enough to understand.

It reminds me of the New Coke ads, which Pepsi followed with the Pepsi Challenge.

It was the other way around -- the Pepsi Challenge was what motivated New Coke.

Thanks, I got it backward.

Ah yes, rebranding, what the marketing department does every few years to justify their existence.

They should launch an updated E-type

Reminds me of Glumlot

I mean, Jaguar has never actually had particularly _good_ logos (it has had one memorably unfortunate one; see their logo from 1935-1945...) To be honest I'm not sure what people are moaning about.

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