The motoring world absolutely flipped their wigs last week when Jaguar launched a series of adverts featuring their new rebrand; which effectively threw 76 years of heritage into the bin. Everything which happened before, which included winning at Le Mans, the elegance of the E-Type in the 1960s, the unexpected brawling nature of the XJS, the second time that they had a go and won at Le Mans again, and then briefly saw their name in Formula One, was all thrown away; in favour of a saccharine eye-diabetes hippy-dippy/woke/DEI/insert rightist-badthink here campaign, purely designed to really really really cause people to pee their pants. This is a rebranding as pure provocation; designed explicitly to get a rise out of people. It worked excellently.
Jaguar Cars Ltd. which itself is a subsidiary/brand of Jaguar Land Rover, very successfully to rebranded itself. This is going to sound controversial but I absolutely understand why they did it. I hate it with every fibre of my being, but as the chances of me ever buying a Jaguar remain at a constant level of nil, then my opinion here moves a corresponding value of nil dollars. If I hate it and you hate it too, then their rebranding has worked perfectly.
Tata Motors couldn't give a flip what squawking blather-bots like Rita Panahi think, but the fact that she gave them free advertising is probably quite hilarious to the marketing execs. If the rise of Elon Musk and Tesla Motors is anything to go by, or the election of his friend Donald Trump to the office of the United States Presidency for a second time is instructive, then yelling anything purely for the outrage, no matter how outlandish or mind-bendingly stupid it is, is excellent at getting you free publicity. Polarise the people. Controversy is the game. It doesn't matter if they hate you, when they all say your name. And say their name we have done.
I think that the Jaguar rebranding is brilliant precisely because people like me and people older than me whose sensibilities are being offended, will all be dead soon. Dead people tend not to buy very many motor cars. Jaguar's rebranding excellently tells people like me that we aren't welcome, that fuddy-duddies even older than me who would have bought them, are allowed to keep their memories and they aren't welcome too. Jaguar's rebranding is very squarely aimed at people who are gaudy and awful but who more importantly, have loadsamoney.
I think that people have forgotten the late 1980s, when immediately before the stock market crash of 1987, neon colours and pastels were all the rage; precisely because the marketing people were all on cocaine and speed. This was the days of high finances where a credit card was equally use to rack up lines, as it was to charge exorbitant amounts of money on corporate expenses; knowing full well that they would never be checked because the other corporate people in accounts, were also all on cocaine and speed. Since 1987, the wealth of the world has condensated and consolidated even faster than it had during the first gilded age; to the point now where more than half of GDP across all OCED nations, is being given to people who do not actually work. The rewards of the economy of rents, dividends, and interest, collectively exceed that of wages.
What does this mean for Jaguar? Quite a lot. All the way back in 2003, Citibank in New York published a series of papers which described the idea of the emerging plutonomy. This is a parallel economy which operates inside the regular economy but one which is deliberately blind of 90% of people. Why bother trying to sell goods and services to anyone other than the richest of people, when they are the ones with all the money. Whatever the old rules of the game were, they are gone. When you add in the hollowing out of what used to be the managerial class and entire wipe-out of front facing service industries like banking, then the market to sell to that insanely rich 10% and 5%, is only getting richer and richer at a faster rate.
Jaguar Cars Ltd. are in the business of doing business. The fact that they sell cars is actually somewhat irrelevant here. What used to be all incarnations of Jaguar are also irrelevant. Jaguar Land Rover itself is a subsidiary of Tata Motors; which as an Indian Company, likely saw dwindling sales across Europe and America following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and then the Pandemic of 2020, and simply decided to abandon bothering to sell cars to those markets. If Formula One is the canary in the coal mine which tells you where the money in the world is, then the money in the world is not longer in places like France or Germany, but in places like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Singapore and the United States; all of which very much run dual economies.
Those place like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Singapore, as far as what they show us in Formula One broadcasts, are as gaudy and as tacky as all get out. In this respect, a gaudy and tacky rebrand to sell to these markets, is completely within context. Then when you add in the newer plutonomies like China and India, where branding also doesn't have to mean anything, then what does it matter. If Chinese car companies can basically sell things with practically no established brand at all, then for Tata Motors to trash any and all goodwill that they may have built up, purely to chase new money, then that's an acceptable business expense.
This is the context in which you need to understand the Jaguar Cars rebranding. Tata Motors which sits at the top of the group, honestly couldn't care a jot about what kind of nonsensical culture wars are being fought across the anglosphere, or what kind of permissiveness is allowed in Europe. Tata Motors simply doesn't care. The main business of doing business, is doing business. If that business entails selling motor cars, the Tata Motors is merely playing exactly the same game as Toyota or General Motors are in Australia. Poorer people can not buy as many cars as they want to sell; so Toyota doesn't even bother to sell a sub-$30K hatchback any more, and General Motors doesn't even bother to sell any family car any more.
The Jaguar rebranding is objectively tasteless but the thing to remember is that it isn't actually for you. It isn't actually for anyone with any kind of Western sensibilities. It isn't for the people who may have associated the brand with a sporting history, and years of elegance. All of the people for whom those things matter, either do not buy Jaguars at all, do not buy enough of them, or will be dead soon. As far as Tata Motors is concerned, trashing the brand is fine because quite frankly, the name is all that matters.
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