Playing To Win
Strategy & Branding
Advertising Malpractice at Jaguar
I have written about this topic before — with respect to the Bud Light fiasco and the true nature of branding — but there is just too much advertising malpractice out there — i.e., willful contravention of the established rules of a discipline — to let the new Jaguar ad campaign pass without comment. So, I have dedicated this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece to Strategy & Branding: Advertising Malpractice at Jaguar. All previous PTW/PI can be found here.
The Background
The Jaguar automobile company (a part of Jaguar Land Rover, which is owned by Tata Motors, which is a subsidiary of Tata & Sons, the giant Indian conglomerate) stopped all production of new vehicles during 2024, will be selling leftovers in 2025 and relaunching itself as an all-electric vehicle (EV) brand in 2026.
It is no surprise that Jaguar is doing something dramatic. It is has been in serious decline and is now a tiny brand. It sold only 8348 vehicles in the US in 2023 and only 64K worldwide. For comparison, Porsche sold 75K in the US and 320K worldwide.
One argument could be that it doesn’t really matter what Jaguar does, that it is too small and too far-gone to survive. But Jaguar is trying and launched a new advertisement on November 19. If you haven’t watched it, take 30 seconds to do so. As you can see, the ad features eight exotically dressed, androgenous models emerging from a futuristic cube accompanied by throbbing music, with five pairs of words successively appearing: create exuberant, live vivid, delete ordinary, break moulds, and copy nothing.
The ad has provoked many attacks with Jaguar Managing Director Rawdon Glover complaining about a “blaze of intolerance” on social media. One of the critics was prominent British politician Nigel Farage, to whom Glover responded: “The average age of the Jaguar client is quite old and getting older. We’ve got to access a completely different audience. That audience isn’t centred around people of the demographic of Mr. Farage.”
Many advertising folks have leapt to the defense of the ad arguing that non-advertising people just don’t understand its brilliance.
Advertising Malpractice
Sorry apologists, this is an example of advertising malpractice, a collaboration between clueless executives at a company and enthusiastic enablers at its ad agency. Only rarely will ad agencies stop eager executives from wasting their money and destroying their brands. I make this assessment from the perspective of helping companies like P&G, Verizon, Lego, American Express, Steelcase, Verizon, Logitech and many more build brands for over 40 years and having published widely on the subject.
There are three reasons why I see this ad as an example of willful contradiction of the rules of advertising: inattention to habits; turning fault lines into fissures; and absence of a promise to the customer.
Inattention to Habits
Habits are centrally important to the effectiveness of branding. I have written about this in Harvard Business Review with one of his generation’s branding gurus, former P&G CEO AG Lafley. Habit is the subconscious feeling of familiarity and comfort that keeps customers returning to a brand. It is more powerful than the conscious act of loyalty. The biggest asset of any brand is customers who have a habit of buying it — whether an F-150 habit, a Tide habit, an iPhone habit, a FedEx habit, etc.
For this reason, when you rebrand, relaunch, re-logo, you force customers to break their habit of buying you because you take away the specific thing for which they have a habit. It is generally a bad idea, but if you insist on doing it, real care is an imperative, which I have written about previously in this series. You need to place the proverbial breadcrumbs close enough together to help the customers maintain their habit. It is better to make any change in ten small steps than a single big one. And mistakes are deadly. Tropicana sales famously dropped 20% in the two months after a packaging change jolted the subconscious habit of picking its (previously) familiar carton off the shelf. It was the same product, the same brand name, the same price, the same placement. But a mere packaging change cost it 20%!
What did Jaguar do? It got rid of its beloved 42-year-old leaping cat logo and replaced it with a wordmark that had no connection to anything in Jaguar’s past. And it announced its rebranding with an ad featuring eight peculiarly dressed, androgenous actors marching around to a bizarre series of word-pairs. The super-strong message to the subconscious of any Jaguar customer — or even enthusiastic non-customer — was clear. Your habit is gone. We are ending it by fiat. It ain’t ever coming back!
Destroying your brand’s habit is silly. It is just a waste of resources. Just shut it down and spend all your resources on starting something new. Don’t call it Jaguar — attempting to leverage what you just destroyed. That is just stupid.
Turning Fault Lines into Fissures
I have also written about this before in this series concerning the Bud Light fiasco. Customers aren’t homogenous. There are fault lines running through customer bases — by which some customers don’t see eye-to-eye with other customers and may not want to be fellow-customers with them. It is a bigger problem with giant brands, like former #1 (and now down to #3) US beer brand Bud Light. But it also the case with tiny brands like Jaguar.
The worst thing a brand can do is take an action that opens a fault line into a gaping fissure — as Bud Light did with its ill-fated Dylan Mulvaney ad. The core of existing Jaguar customers is “older, affluent individual who value status, luxury, and exclusivity.” There may be customers (or potential ones) that react favorably to bizarrely attired androgenous models strutting weirdly — though arguably not one who looks the part of a Jaguar driver. But if there are such customers, the ad drove a giant wedge between them and real Jaguar customers.
However, Managing Director Glover isn’t worried: “We assume that 10 to 15 percent of our current Jaguar customers will follow us, so relatively few.” In this respect, the ad makes sense if his goal was to chase away 85–90% of his customer base. Running a polarizing ad that turns a fault line into a huge fissure alienating 85–90% of his customers to appeal to 10–15% (though that appeal is highly speculative for reasons I will discuss below) of his base is a terrific methodology.
However, it returns us to the above point. Why waste time, energy and money trashing every connection to your brand? Just drop it and create a new EV brand like Rivian or Polestar. That would be smarter.
Absence of a Promise to the Customer
If you are bound and determined to chase almost all your existing customers to start the process of building a new brand, you would want an ad that is effective in appealing to that new set of customers. This isn’t.
The core characteristic of an effective brand building ad campaign is clear, as I have written (with colleagues Jann Schwarz and Mimi Turner) in a Harvard Business Review article that was informed by a massive research study of over 2000 ad campaigns. (That study focused on B2C advertisers and based on questions from B2B companies, we replicated the study using over 700 B2B advertising campaigns. The effect in B2B ad campaigns was similar — only stronger.)
The core finding of the work is that effective advertising makes a promise to the customer (PTTC) that is: 1) memorable to the customer; 2) valuable to the customer; and 3) is deliverable by the company doing the advertising and auditable by the customer to whom the promise is made. For example, Geico’s ‘fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent’ is a highly effective PTTC. It is a memorable turn of phrase delivered by the appealing gecko character. It deals directly with a core, valuable category benefit: affordability. And customers can judge by spending the fifteen minutes whether they can save fifteen percent. Ads that contain a PTTC with these three characteristics dramatically outperform on a wide range of economic outcomes (e.g. share growth, penetration growth, brand consideration, etc.) ones that do not.
When the Jaguar ad is evaluated on those principles, it is a complete failure. The visual content makes no PTTC. The script content is hopelessly confusing. It is difficult to discern who is the object of: create exuberant; live vivid; delete ordinary; break moulds; copy nothing. Are these admonitions to Jaguar to itself? If it is, it makes the classic mistake of the advertising focusing on the company not the customer. Jaguar is going to be exuberant, vivid, un-ordinary, mold-breaking, and original. That is not memorable — it is so confusing that it is immediately forgettable. That is not valuable — there is no obvious benefit to the customer. And it is not deliverable or auditable — all those potential aspects of Jaguar are in the eyes of the beholder and largely unmeasurable.
If instead, the five word-pairs are aimed at the customer, they aren’t PTTC. Essentially, they order customers around, essentially asking for them, without any rationale, to conform to a set of values that are at best elliptically related to automobiles.
Defenders will argue that the purpose of this ad is not to sell cars. It is just ‘a teaser’ to ‘raise awareness’ and show how bold Jaguar is. Teasing and raising awareness can be good things but only under certain circumstances. Teasing narcissistically and confusingly isn’t useful to building a worthwhile brand. And you only want to raise awareness for something good for the customer. Raising awareness to something confusing and advertiser-centric has zero utility. And signaling boldness is only beneficial if it is boldness that is connected to and facilitative of customer benefits — and this ad is too confusing and narcissistic to convey that impression. Net, these are utterly specious defenses.
From an effectiveness standpoint, this ad is just plain dreadful — of zero positive value.
Practitioner Insights
This Jaguar ad is an example of the unholy alliance between company marketers and advertising agency executives. Far too many company marketers want to make ‘bold branding and/or rebranding moves.’ And far too many advertising agency executives want to help them because that kind of work wins them industry accolades, like Cannes Lion awards, which makes it exciting for and attractive to them. And because there are so many things other than crappy advertising that can be blamed for bad company performance, company marketers aren’t fearful of the downside. Though occasionally they get caught red-handed — as with Tropicana and Bud Light.
But most of those ‘bold moves’ should never happen. While they may be of net benefit to advertising agencies, they aren’t for the companies who pay for them. Many ad campaigns simply waste 100% of the money spent; others (e.g. Bud Light) are far worse than nothing.
If you are a company marketer, you must understand that most advertising agency executives will not help protect you from mistakes, they will act as enablers of your mistakes. You must show discipline on your own. And if you are a company colleague of marketing executives, you need to try to help them with that discipline, to the extent you can.
That discipline entails keeping three things top-of-mind. First, it entails paying close attention to customers’ habit of purchasing you and not putting roadblocks in the path of that habit. Second, in means ensuring that you consider the potential for damaging impact of your actions on potentially dangerous fault lines that lie below the surface of its customer base. Third, it requires making absolutely certain that whatever you do, you make a memorable, valuable, and deliverable/auditable promise to the customer.
Marketing executives need help in avoiding the thinking patterns that lead to ads like the Bud Light Mulvaney ad and this abomination from Jaguar. To the extent that you can, please help them!
