Jaguar unveiled the Type 01 in New York last week. All-electric four-door grand tourer, roughly 400 miles of range, starting price $130,500.
It arrives in showrooms next year.
Which is good, because those showrooms do not currently have any new cars in them.
Read that twice. A 103-year-old automaker stopped selling cars, spent two years on brand strategy, and will resume selling cars at some point in 2027, beginning at a hundred and thirty thousand dollars.
A quick recap for anyone who missed the campaign.
Two years ago Jaguar launched its reinvention with an advertisement featuring models in brightly colored clothing walking across a pastel landscape. The slogan was "Copy Nothing."
There was no car in it.
Not a hidden car. Not a silhouette of a car. No car. An automobile manufacturer produced a worldwide advertising campaign containing zero automobiles, and then seemed genuinely surprised when people noticed.
The internet did what the internet does. The company was accused of going woke, the clip was replayed several million times with commentary, and the follow-up concept vehicle arrived in pink and blue, which did not settle anybody down.
Managing Director Rawdon Glover's assessment of that period: it "wasn't always easy."
His earlier reasoning is the part worth quoting.
Before the backlash, Glover explained the strategy to the Financial Times.
"If we play in the same way that everybody else does, we'll just get drowned out."
He has a point. Nobody drowned him out. He is correct that the campaign achieved differentiation.
It is just that the thing it differentiated Jaguar from was selling cars.
The numbers from the reveal.
Sentiment tracking on the Type 01 launch came back at 14 percent positive and 22 percent negative, with the balance neutral or unaware.
More people disliked the new car than liked it, and the analysts attributed that directly to the rebrand that has trailed the company since the teaser.
Two years, an entire product line discontinued, and the first impression of the new vehicle is still being graded on a commercial with no vehicle in it.
To be fair, because we try to be.
The Type 01 looks like a serious car. Four hundred miles of range is genuinely competitive. The upmarket strategy, pursuing a smaller and wealthier customer base rather than chasing volume against the Germans, is a defensible bet and not an obviously stupid one. Plenty of luxury brands have made exactly that pivot and survived.
The underlying restructuring also predates the advertising controversy. The decision to go all-electric and move upmarket was made before anybody shot that commercial.
So this is not a story about a car company destroyed by an advertisement. It is a story about a car company that made a huge strategic bet and then hired someone to announce it in the most alienating way available.
The lesson, which costs you nothing.
There is a difference between being distinctive and being baffling, and the difference is whether the customer understands what you are selling.
Cracker Barrel found this out this year. They simplified a logo nobody had ever studied, and 76 percent of people who noticed said they preferred the old one. Not because it was better design. Because it was theirs, and the change read as a company deciding its own history was embarrassing.
Jaguar did the same thing in a more expensive way. Three generations of people associate that badge with E-Types and Le Mans and a particular idea of British engineering. The company looked at that inheritance and decided the correct opening move was pastel.
Here is the thing about heritage brands.
The heritage is the product.
If you have a hundred years of people loving your cars, you do not need to explain that you are new. You need to show them the car.
Jaguar is about to do that, roughly twenty-four months after it would have been useful.
The Type 01 may well be excellent. We hope it is. There is no good reason for an automaker with that history to disappear, and plenty of reasons to want it to work.
But somebody in that building spent two years and a full product line learning something a dealership manager in Leeds could have told them for free.
Show the car.
- Article Source:
FAFO
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