Jaguar we sure about all this?

There have been lots of hot takes about Jaguar, and I’ve been doomscrolling through Linkedin finding the great, good and somewhat grotesque commentary from across the creative community. 

I thought it only right to let the hot air cool while Storm Bert did its thing and in turn add my ‘tepid take’ to the debate on this slightly balmy and sunny Monday. 

I’d like to think I fully understand the ins and outs of diversity and inclusion in the creative and marketing space given our work with business leaders and marketers. They come to us to reduce their chances of not f**king it up when it comes to retaining their current audiences while trying to reach new ones. Mostly they want to represent and reflect society as it ever evolves so that they’re leading brands that are authentic, relevant and credible in an ever changing world. 

We talk about lived expertise and so the “lived” part for me here is that I’m a massive petrolhead. I’m someone who watched Top Gear before Richard Hammond arrived and when they actually reviewed cars. I’m someone who got really into Wheeler Dealers on Dave and even considered a career as a car journalist. 

I’m also someone who has owned a car from the Jaguar Land Rover family - no it wasn’t a Jaguar before someone from the depths of Linkedin chimes in and says ‘I don’t really get it’. For a few years I owned a Range Rover Evoque, before I realised that was just silly for two people and a dog and I’d be just fine with a soon-to-be classic Mercedes CLK that serves me and my family just fine. 

I haven’t considered a Jag or Jaaaaaaagggg as Jeremy Clarkson might say. It may be because of the connection it has with John “Two Jags” Prescott who coincidentally passed away in the same week as the new brand launch. It’s more the sense that it wasn’t a brand for me and the fact that Victoria Beckham pedalling a Range Rover is what got me to reappraise what Range Rover was about (dear reader, I’ll leave you to decide how sarcastic I’m being here). 

This all changed last week. 

When I read the word “diversity” in the initial news story about Jaguar’s rebrand - where it wasn’t much more than a press release announcement and some journalists at the launch - I thought “oh god, here we go again”. Rawdon Glover, Jaguar’s Managing Director, has since said the campaign “is not about diversity and inclusivity”, but rather “breaking moulds, living vividly, and creating objects of desire that are distinctive and different”, but “breaking moulds must DIE” has less of a ring to it when it comes to X/Twitter. 

Lo and behold, in the days that followed we had tear downs from everyone from Marina Hyde to Nigel Farage, with just about anyone and everyone in the advertising industry throwing in their two cents on Linkedin. I can’t help but think the industry’s ‘boycott’ of X/Twitter has meant our Linkedin timelines have taken over, but that’s a post for another day. 

Such was my obsession on Saturday that I almost asked a Jaguar driver in the supermarket car park what he thought of the whole thing, but as I approached his F-Pace I discovered he was asleep behind the wheel - I assumed perhaps he’s just exhausted from the whole debate. Thankfully the car was parked, but I couldn’t help but laugh that he was quite literally the opposite of ‘woke’. 

And, as we know, ‘woke’ is becoming a sitting duck in the industry and in society today. Indeed, in the debate I argued at the House of Commons, the anti-woke movement is actually fuelling creativity: ref Aldi’s response to the Jag ad for proof.

What we’ve seen this week has been a masterclass in media manipulation, and I think there are a number of questions for anyone working in the advertising and marketing industry right now. Many say they want to be a proponent of progressiveness, but Jaguar has shown us that we’re caught up in a very real culture war. 

1. Who’s the audience anyway? 

   
   

Jaguar has been trying to move away from older male buyers for over a decade now. In 2011 they launched a direct mail campaign targeting women, saying:

“We’ve woken up to the fact that there is a huge audience of powerful, wealthy women that want to be treated respectfully. We don’t want to forget our predominantly male audience, but design and luxury are our selling points and there are a lot of wealthy, powerful, empowered women that appeals to.” 

Now they are appealing to “younger, wealthier, more urban shoppers” that are described as “design-minded” and “cash-rich, time-poor”. Why urban shoppers want and need a car - let alone a Jaguar - in the world of Uber is surprising and perhaps that’s the problem.

There’s nothing concrete from Jaguar about this new target demographic. If anything, “design-minded” people are the same people who tend to challenge the status quo and who right-leaning political parties continue to paint to be the enemy of traditional values. This got even louder when Volvo launched this video in the same week, which stunned many by showcasing family safety with storytelling. 

If anything, the audience could be construed by some as a ‘woke blob’, which is exactly what is getting everyone up in arms. This begs the next question for advertising industry diehards. 

2. Are you snorting lines of woke?

The ‘woke blob’ is the handy collective noun coined by Michael Gove when referring to civil servants back in 2014. Gove was given a £320,000 contract for a driver and a - you guessed it - Jaguar - to drive him round during the pandemic. I can’t possibly think why Jaguar might want a rebrand.

But where there’s a woke blob, there’s an online mob. It’s this line in Giles Coren’s takedown that really caught my eye: 

Like most adverts now, this is a story of rich white heterosexuals selling stuff to other rich white heterosexuals, using images of multi-ethnic, pansexual, differently abled humans in order to appear progressive, without actually doing or changing anything. 

There’s a point in here. The advertising industry faces big questions and sadly countless conferences don’t offer gritty enough answers. Big TV adverts are being threatened by new media consumption behaviours and the need for hyper personalisation in a world where earned media matters even more. The systems and structures around how advertising gets done are broken and being rethought. And the way that diversity and inclusion is being embedded is still surface level, often beginning and ending with conversations around ‘on screen representation’. 

The industry might appear liberal to those outside of it, but on the inside I’d argue that there isn’t enough diversity of thought and nuance when it comes to really making change for underrepresented groups. All too often ‘diversity’ gets slapped on as an afterthought in the casting brief, and the result is that underrepresented groups face abuse - Nigel Farage literally called the advert protagonists ‘non-human figures’, which sets everyone back. 

When Jaguar’s Managing Director Rawdon Glover stated he’s ‘disappointed by “the level of vile hatred and intolerance” in the comments regarding the individuals that appeared in the video’, the Telegraph cut the second part of the sentence and ran a headline: “Jaguar boss says criticism of rebrand is ‘vile hatred and intolerance’”.

This not only incensed the mob further, but also further demonises marginalised and underrepresented groups who feel the brunt of where society and culture is today. We’ve all got bigger battles to fight right now and I’m not sure a

Jaguar advert is the hill we want to die on. 

3. Is the MailOnline still your barometer of success? 

   
   

Many in advertising would dream of their campaign earning the media reach that the MailOnline provides. Indeed, their PR agencies would be trying hard to extend any advert into earned media to give it a bigger bang-for-the-buck. 

But what happens when that media coverage is at the expense of someone’s life being treated with a nostalgic dose of homophobia that takes us back to Jaguar’s 1980s heyday? 

That’s exactly what happened and the queer community on my timeline were rightly sharing their outrage and indignation at the JLR marketing director’s life being screenshotted all over the website. The piece creates vile links between diversity, equity and inclusion and suggests this to be a ‘Bud Light’ movement, further feeding into a narrative of ‘go woke, go broke’. 

As a gay person working in the field it makes me want to shut down because I’ve seen first hand how media titles subvert all things DEI into a culture war, chewing up people in their wake with battle cries of woke. It happened to a friend of mine and once the train leaves the station, it’s hard to return and to reconstruct everything it has left in its wake. 

It’s one thing to do ‘allyship training’, it’s another to report this article to IPSO. 

4. What’s the actual product? 

   
   

As a fan of Mark Ritson the lack of product in this launch is curious here. The noise suggests the new car is going to cost six figures, and I’d like to see the data on how affordable it will be with those “younger, wealthier, more urban shoppers”, because I’m not convinced they’re in Britain.

If it’s an overseas buyer they’re targeting then it’s curious they haven’t featured any overt facets of Britishness within the launch. I’m not the first to say this. MINI has blazed a trail in making Britishness an international sales phenomenon in the automotive industry. However, Jaguar reinventing itself as a British icon - in a post-Brexit climate and a drifting ‘special relationship’ - is harder than we think on a global scale. 

If we look back to ‘what was’ when it came to Jaguar - large, gas guzzling cars driven by middle to upper class men - that won’t last for ‘what will be’. Perhaps the response to this campaign is forming Jaguar’s right to play in the market. 

They’ve played right into the heart of the culture war, which is central to British culture right now. We might pretend our lips are stiffer than America’s, but we just can’t stop our tongues wagging around the major power, cultural and demographic shifts happening round the world right now. Central to this is changing gender roles, and I’ve found it telling that so much of the critique has come from men. In private WhatsApp groups with my female friends I’ve gotten real depth of insight, and terms that I daren’t use in this piece for fear of reprisal. 

As we enter a week-long countdown to see the new year, I just think we need to be careful of all this hot air and keep calm and carry on. Jaguar certainly seems to be doing that. 

So let’s just wait and see if the car is any good, shall we?

Darren Styles OBE suggests it’s going to be worth it.