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For all companies, there comes a time when a rebrand is needed—either to attract new customers, to keep the old ones interested, or both. A rebrand can take a company to unprecedented heights or unexpected lows.
Currently, vehicle company Jaguar is in the middle of rebranding, and so far, it seems that their case is the latter one. It’s all because people online aren’t satisfied with the so-called “wokeness” that the brand is trying to push with their ad, in which they don’t even show a single car.
Back in the beginning of November of 2024, Jaguar, a luxury vehicle brand, announced they are taking all of their cars off sale to get ready for a rebrand.
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Now, the day has come, and the rebrand is here. Starting from 2026, the company will only be manufacturing and selling electric cars. With this news, they also launched a new logo, marketing slogans and an ad showing it all off.
In this 30-second video, there are diverse people shown in bright colors, with slogans like ‘break moulds,’ ‘create exuberant,’ and probably the main one, ‘copy nothing’ displayed on the screen. At the end of it, there is a new logo shown – “JaGUar”, with seamlessly blended upper and lower case characters in visual harmony. Interestingly, for an ad from a car company, there are no cars shown.
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The latter “flaw” is one of the reasons why the rebrand wasn’t met with much enthusiasm. Even Elon Musk tried “roasting” them for this by tweeting on his platform, “Do you sell cars?”. The Jaguar brand didn’t give in to the billionaire’s “roast,” and suggested he come to Miami on December 2nd and see their new lineup. But Elon wasn’t the only one making this point online.
This wasn’t the only issue people had with the rebrand. One of the other heavily talked about issues was that this new brand look didn’t represent its actual customer, which sounds kind of ironic seeing that the company is rebranding to be more inclusive.
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What this claim means is that basically, the company that owns Jaguar, Tata motors, isn’t British, so they lost a sense of how a British brand like Jaguar should look, thereby taking away its heritage. The company was created in 1922, but made its name when they started manufacturing eye-catching sports cars, and ever since, they have remained a luxury brand.
Luxury is something that not everyone can have, something that is limited to a certain group of people. So, when Jaguar now strives to be more inclusive, it’s understandable why some people are displeased.
If it’s attainable by more people from different walks of life, luxury (which is also sometimes linked with British, especially royal British culture) is not the same anymore. Simply said, the target audience isn’t reached with this ad.
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Some people also had an issue with the rebrand’s slogan “copy nothing.” These critics pointed out the irony that by making the Jaguar’s logo simpler, the company essentially is copying the trend of others simplifying their logos, too.
Besides all of this, there has been a bit of transphobic discourse too, especially on X. Without giving them too much attention, we can simply say that the rhetoric some of the critics use is unwarranted, no matter how much they don’t like the ad.
All of these (and probably some others we didn’t catch) criticisms forced the people behind the rebrand to defend their idea. In an interview with Financial Times, managing director of Jaguar, Rawdon Glover, said the intended message of the ad had been lost in social media’s “blaze of intolerance” and denied that it was supposed to be a “woke” statement.
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He also added that they simply don’t want their brand to look like any other, as it would drown between all of them. Basically, they wanted to move away from traditional automotive stereotypes.
Sadly, the rebrand didn’t work as intended. Instead, people online are either recreating how they think the ad should have looked or are simply roasting it with hilarious memes and reactions.
Well, at this point it doesn’t seem that Jaguar is going to back out from what they have planned. So, we’ll have to wait and see whether this rebrand will be the death of Jaguar, as many netizens are predicting, or not. Only time will tell.
While that happens, make sure to scroll down to see the reactions and memes we talked about.
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