“I don't think you can plan to be the most talked-about brand on the planet…” says Jaguar boss Rawdon Glover, as he recalls those few days late last year after Jaguar’s rebranding, which must have left him reaching for his phone’s mute button.
Ultimately, “the strategy played out” because the rebranding was designed to increase interest in the concept car that was soon to be unveiled. “You do a tease phase to ultimately get more eyeballs on the real thing”, says Glover, and Jaguar certainly did that.
Yet he admits: “On a personal level, it took everybody a little bit by surprise in just how much commentary, how much debate, how much engagement there was on that.”
It was not all positive – quite the opposite – and there “was definitely a little bit of shock” in some of the responses. Glover’s analysis shows a clear dividing line between social media reaction and general media reaction. Guess which one was more constructive and nuanced.
Still, a goal of the rebranding was for Jaguar to be relevant. Glover says: “In the cultural Gulf Stream… when someone like Elon Musk is commenting on it, you think: ‘Oh, we’re in the conversation.’ In one respect, it’s job done. We’re getting visibility.
“That’s one of my reflections from it: that for years nobody was talking about Jaguar and then for a few days everybody was. Nobody had been talking about what Jaguar was doing prior to this, so if you gave me the option of being talked about or not talked about, it’s obvious what you’d take.”
The pile-on against the rebranding was “a bit frustrating” because two weeks later there would be a physical car to attach it to for the first time and all would become clear.
“We knew that when stories started to land on the concept, it would balance out the argument – and that’s pretty much what we saw,” says Glover.
Indeed, another reason the rebranding came before the car was because “everything we want to do at Jaguar is to be brand-led”.
Glover elaborates: “With the way EVs are moving and the homogeneity of EV products, if you are going to be an EV-only brand, your brand has really got to differentiate. So starting off just by talking about the brand and not leaping straight into a vehicle you can buy seemed like an entirely appropriate place to start.”
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