On November 19, 2024, Jaguar released a short film with no car in it. Instead of walnut dashboards and the Scottish countryside, it showed models of every age, gender and skin color in bright, sculptural outfits, over three lines: "live vivid," "delete ordinary," "copy nothing."
The reaction was immediate and close to unanimous. Elon Musk asked whether the company still sold cars. British politicians called it a betrayal. YouTube filled up with videos titled "the worst rebrand in history," and most marketing commentators agreed.
Six months later, the numbers seemed to settle the debate. In April 2025, only 49 new Jaguars were registered in Europe, against 1,961 a year earlier, a drop of 97.5%. "Go woke, go broke," said the critics, and everyone moved on.
That story is satisfying, and it's mostly wrong. The collapse has little to do with the ad. And the ad, read closely, looks less like an accident than a deliberate, risky and fairly cold-blooded strategy. I didn't like it either. I've come to think it may have been the only move Jaguar had left.
01Why everyone agreed so quickly
Consensus that fast deserves a second look, so let's take the criticism apart.
"There's no car in it." The first objection, and the weakest. Brands sell a way of life more often than an object. Red Bull has built one of the strongest brands in the world on extreme sports, with the can a supporting actor. Nobody complains about that.
Social proof did the rest. Once the first critics spoke up, mocking Jaguar became safe, then rewarding. Nobody wanted to be the person defending the strange ad.
Then the attention economy took over. Criticizing Jaguar earned views. For anyone with a publishing calendar to fill, it was an easy target with guaranteed engagement. "The worst rebrand in history" gets far more clicks than "a nuanced look at Jaguar's repositioning," and nobody making a living from viral outrage had any reason to calm things down.
Ideology sharpened it. For one part of the political spectrum, Jaguar had stood for traditional British prestige. Seeing it replaced by androgynous models read as a cultural betrayal, and the ready-made explanation was the one used for Bud Light in 2023, when a partnership with a transgender influencer set off a boycott and a steep drop in sales.
Status quo bias made it personal. Most of us carry some affection for what Jaguar used to mean, and nobody likes seeing something familiar swept away. Every rebrand meets this. Airbnb's 2014 logo was mocked across the internet for weeks; today nobody gives it a second thought.
Finally, the experts. The more considered critiques said the work was simply weak: "copy nothing" sounded like a tired echo of Apple's "Think Different," and the look, with its candy colors, cardboard sets and deliberately odd haircuts, felt closer to a dated cosmetics campaign than to luxury cars.
That last point is the one I find hardest to believe. A campaign like this goes through dozens of experienced people and several rounds of approval. Either all of them missed it, or the slightly cheap, outrageous look was intentional. If it was, it did its job: it made the break with Jaguar's old-money image as loud as it could possibly be.
02The 97% has a boring explanation
In 2021, Jaguar Land Rover announced a plan called Reimagine. Jaguar would stop selling its petrol and hybrid models and come back as an all-electric luxury brand. In the meantime, it would have almost nothing new to sell.
That's exactly what happened. By spring 2025, the F-Type, XE and XF were gone, Jaguar had already stopped selling new cars in its home market, and the first model of the new era was still about a year away. Dealers had close to nothing in the showroom. You can't sell cars you no longer make, whatever your ads look like.
The 97% measures an empty product pipeline. Many of the people sharing it knew that. It just made a better headline the other way.
The same reflex kicked in again in August 2025, when JLR's chief executive, Adrian Mardell, announced he would step down. For the critics, more proof. A long and delayed production gap is a far more likely reason for a change at the top than a single campaign.
Psychologists call this confirmation bias: we look for, interpret and remember the information that confirms what we already believe, and quietly skip the rest. Now here's the uncomfortable thought. What if that bias was part of Jaguar's plan all along?
03Let your enemies introduce you
Jaguar never announced a new target audience. It did something subtler. It made a piece of work it knew certain people would hate, and let those people step forward and declare themselves its opponents.
Pierre Bourdieu described the mechanism in Distinction, his 1979 study of taste: our tastes are first and foremost distastes. We rarely build preferences in the abstract. We build them against what other people like. If people I dislike love something, I'm inclined to find it ridiculous. And if people I dislike attack something loudly, I become curious about it.
So the moment one camp named Jaguar public enemy number one, it sent a positive signal to the other camp. The enemy of my enemy, applied to a car brand. Jaguar's managing director, Rawdon Glover, played his part: speaking to the Financial Times days later, he deplored the "vile hatred and intolerance" aimed at the campaign, while noting that Jaguar needed "to attract a new customer base." Whether or not it was planned, it was the right line to rally the people who felt attacked alongside the brand.
None of this is unprecedented, in either direction.
Subaru, the quiet version. In the 1990s, with US sales falling, Subaru's research found that lesbian women were one of its most loyal customer groups. It chose to speak to them directly, with signals clear to the community and invisible to almost everyone else: "XENA LVR" license plates in ads, rainbow details, a line like "Get Out. And Stay Out." It later signed Martina Navratilova and placed its cars in The L Word. Subaru became the brand of a community that felt seen, and the strategy helped pull the company out of its crisis.
American Eagle, the loud version from the other side. In summer 2025, its campaign line "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans" was criticized for the pun on genes. Then Donald Trump praised the ad, and the stock jumped 24% in a single day.
The mechanism works both ways, and it works because everyone involved benefits from the fight. Where Subaru chose quiet signals, Jaguar chose the loudest possible break. Every outraged post and angry video added to the symbol it was building. It turned its critics into unpaid promoters.
04Loved by everyone, bought by almost no one
The outrage itself is revealing. People were genuinely upset to see the old Jaguar erased: the E-Type, Steve McQueen, the British gentleman driver, timeless elegance. That anger proves how much emotional attachment the brand still carried.
But ask how many of the people defending it would actually have bought one. That was Jaguar's problem long before the ad. Its sales peaked at 180,833 cars in 2018 and fell to 61,661 in 2022, a drop of about two thirds, and that was before the new strategy emptied the showrooms.
David Aaker, one of the founders of modern brand thinking, gives us the right distinction for this. Brand equity is the capital a brand builds over time: recognition, associations, heritage, affection. Jaguar had an enormous amount of it. Brand relevance, the subject of his 2011 book Brand Relevance, is something else: whether the brand comes to mind, and wins, at the moment someone is actually choosing what to buy. On that measure, Jaguar was close to zero. Next to Mercedes, BMW or Audi, it had no category it clearly led: not the most reliable, not the most innovative, not the most desirable.
Aaker's answer to that kind of trap is to stop fighting for scraps in a crowded category and create a subcategory where you're the only relevant option.
And this is where equity turns into a poison. It makes you feel healthy, because people talk about you with respect and nostalgia. Respect and nostalgia don't pay for factories. The defenders of the old Jaguar were defending a brand they weren't buying against a new one they won't buy either. Their anger was sincere, and commercially irrelevant. The market had delivered its verdict years before the film.
05Why a refresh would not have been enough
Every marketer who criticized the campaign had an alternative in mind, usually the same one: keep the heritage, modernize it, play the nostalgia card with a wink. Jaguar had already tried that. In 2014 it ran its "British villains" campaign, with Ben Kingsley, Tom Hiddleston and Mark Strong as elegant bad guys. Stylish, admired, and followed by the long decline in the figures above. It's also what almost every heritage brand does when it starts to struggle, which is precisely why it no longer sets anyone apart.
The other option was the one Jaguar chose: throw everything out and start again. Strictly speaking, this isn't a rebrand. A rebrand keeps some anchors and pivots perception around them. Jaguar kept none: the look, the codes, the world and even the logo were redrawn. It's closer to creating a new brand that happens to keep an old name.
The business plan explains the radicalism. The new Jaguar is meant to be fully electric and to move sharply upmarket, closer to Bentley and Aston Martin than to BMW and Mercedes. Fewer cars, at much higher prices. Try selling an all-electric future at Bentley prices with the codes of a Scottish shooting weekend. You can't be the conservative choice and the disruptor at the same time.
The philosopher Jacques Derrida liked the Greek word pharmakon, which means both poison and cure. Jaguar's campaign works like one. The destruction of its heritage is the poison, and the controversy it triggered is the cure for its irrelevance. In a few weeks, Jaguar converted decades of quiet, sterile affection into attention on a scale it had never bought, and everyone in the world now knows the brand is changing. Its critics will keep repeating the story for years, for free.
There's one more mechanism at work, and it goes beyond politics. Evolutionary biologists talk about costly signaling: a signal is only credible if it's expensive to produce, the peacock's tail being the classic example. Driving a post-rebrand Jaguar will be a costly signal, socially more than financially. You'll have to carry the looks, the comments, the jokes. That's exactly what will make it readable. Owning one will say something clear about you: I don't follow the consensus. The louder the controversy, the clearer the signal.
That's the bet. Displease a lot of people on purpose, to matter intensely to a few, and sell those few a very expensive car. It only works at the top of the price range. At the top of the price range, it can work very well.
06What to take from it
You don't need to like the campaign, and you certainly don't need to copy it. But four lessons hold for almost any company.
- Separate affection from purchase. Ask what people feel about your brand, and separately, how often it wins when they're actually choosing. A brand can be loved and irrelevant at the same time, and the first number will hide the second for years.
- Read the numbers before the narrative. The 97% was true and almost meaningless. Before reacting to a figure, yours or a competitor's, ask what else changed in the same period.
- Polarization has a price list. Being loved intensely by a few and disliked loudly by many works when you sell a small number of expensive things to a clearly defined audience. For a mass brand that needs everyone, as Bud Light found out, it can be ruinous.
- When irrelevance is the problem, half a change rarely solves it. If the old codes can't carry the new business, a careful refresh just spends money to stay invisible. If you break, break completely, and accept the noise.
The real verdict won't come from YouTube or from April 2025's registrations. It will come in 2026 and 2027, when the new Jaguars actually reach the showrooms and we see who signs the order forms. Until then, the most hated rebrand of the decade remains one of the most interesting bets in recent marketing.
