Copy nothing!
https://bit.ly/3OpOGf2
I haven’t posted anything here for quite a while, but the recent “antics” of the board of directors of Jaguar Cars Limited have forced a reaction from me. The Jaguar Cars Limited company really came into it’s own in 1948 with the launch of the XK120, a car that set the standard for sports cars and which was designed by Sir William Lyons, who had founded the company in 1922, making motorcycle side cars.
William Lyons was a genius designer, and each of the continuous flow of Jaguar cars that followed the XK120 became an icon of British motorcar design. Each was imbued with a character that was appreciated as much as the design and engineering that went into it’s creation at the factory at Coventry in the West Midlands of England. Sir William had a knack of building high quality cars at an affordable price for his target market sector, which was the “professional” class of solicitors, architects, doctors and the like.
In 1962 Jaguar launched the most iconic sports car of all time, the Jaguar E-Type. The design of this car was so revolutionary and striking that it caused a sensation. I vividly remember getting a passing glimpse of it for the first time, from a bus I was travelling in, in the Jaguar dealer’s showroom window in Eloff Street, Johannesburg. So taken was I, that I prevailed upon my father to drive me back into town after supper that evening, so that I could have a good look at it. Sir William Lyons coined the motto for Jaguar as a car of “Grace, Space and Pace.”
Over the years that followed, Jaguar Cars were bought by British Motor Holdings, which in 1968 merged with Leyland Motor Corporation which was nationalised in 1975. It is a tribute to Sir William and the heritage of the workers at the Jaguar factory that the car survived the drop in overall quality of manufacture brought on by being state owned. Jaguar was spun off from British Leyland and was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1984, and was then acquired by Ford in 1990. Ford are not fools, and recognised the potential of the Jaguar brand. The result was that Ford virtually wrote Jaguar a blank cheque and allowed it access to the vast Ford engineering, component and world-wide supply chain. Ford also bought Land Rover in 2000 and merged the two companies into Jaguar Land Rover Limited. Access to Ford engine design resulted in the dropping of the venerable Jaguar AJ6 and AJ12 engines and replacing them with new custom designed V8 normally aspirated engines as well as a supercharged 4.2L engine. Ford also facilitated the manufacture of the entire monocoque of the XJ saloons in aluminium, a revolutionary process.
The target market was the USA and in this, Jaguar was very successful. Ford sold the company off in 2008 to Tata Motors of India. This was the end, in my estimation, of the Jaguar that we had come to know and love as an icon of British motoring. Under Tata, the quality of assembly and engineering became no better that any other contemporary car, and iconic models such as the XJ saloons were dropped and replaced firstly with the XF and then with SUV designs. Sales numbers suffered accordingly because Jaguar had lost it’s traditional following and it’s unique market and was competing with Japanese, German and Korean marques. Years of zero profitability followed, and in 2024, it was announced that Jaguar would stop all manufacture until 2026, when it would re-introduce electric only luxury cars to the market.
I don’t care how luxurious or high-tech these cars will be, in my estimation Jaguar cars are no more and never will be. Their latest video ad illustrates my point precisely. Like most other iconic British brands such as Rolls Royce, Bently, Aston Martin, Cadbury, Pitco Tips, Burberry, etc., Jaguar will go down in history as the best of British, that was.
The following is from Marketing Week’s Mark Ritson:
“If Jaguar wants to be a proper luxury brand, it needs to stop worrying about what generic luxury is and simply learn to be very specifically itself.
Every luxury brand needs to revitalise itself. Any brand over the age of 50 does. And the EV revolution forces a car brand to reinterpret itself urgently for a new modernity. But brand revitalisation is very different from rebranding. The Jaguar team are changing what Jaguar stands for and how it presents itself. They aim to be radical. To shock. To do it differently from before. It’s too much, and way past the sweet spot of proper brand revitalisation, which combines a respect for history and desire for modernity. Jaguar should have gone back to the glory days of this great brand and asked what that looked like for 2025 with an electric engine. Whatever the answer to that tricky question might be, it isn’t colourful but disconnected fashion models exiting a yellow elevator on planet Uranus.
The positioning Jaguar has adopted also seems overblown, curiously disconnected from automotive customers and almost entirely filled with bollocks. In the great days of Jaguar, the brand was defined as ‘Grace, Space, Pace’. That’s still a car I want to buy. A big cat in a small cage. Especially if it’s British, and even better with a 2025 electric drivetrain. But who wants to buy a car that is “exuberant”, “modernist” and “fearlessly creative”. I’m driving to Tesco to pick up my groceries, not hosting a birthday party for Basquiat. Jaguar has mistaken its internal project notes for the very different challenge of positioning a great brand to consumers. Show me a consumer looking to buy an “exuberant” motor vehicle and I’ll show you an AI-generated picture of a six fingered supermodel that turns into a horse.
The appeal of origin
We should underline Britishness too. In all the talk of Miami Art Shows and Paris boutiques, the team should have reasserted that Jaguar is a very British brand. I say that not to be jingoistic, but commercial. The paradox of being global is that you need to push your British origins to get there. I have several car-loving German friends who begrudgingly admit that a great British car is something they long for more than any other. There is a certain slice of the American car-buying populace that hankers for a British-made vehicle. I know, and you know, that this does not make any sense. But it’s a market truth. And it is a massive opportunity for Jaguar, which they will miss!
RIP Jaguar.
