Autopsy of A Jaguar: the staggeringly offensive rebrand that no one likes

What do high earning women like? Hot pink, right?

I’m fortunate enough to have crashed through the ceiling of several marketing teams and fumbled around until I worked out how it all works. In short, marketing is identifying who your consumers are, who they could be, and how best to attract or retain more. You have your TAM (total addressable market), your SAM (serviceable addressable market), and your SOM (serviceable obtainable market). Once you’ve carefully gone over the numbers, worked out your target demographics, major markets, and potential outreach and spend, you can crack on by making things look pretty and choosing a font. I’ll elaborate on anything more complicated as we go along. All caught up?

Great. Jaguar clearly didn’t get the memo. Get ready for the most patronising, micro-aggression packed, astonishingly bad feat of marketing ever seen. So where did it all go wrong? What could they have done differently? I will begin.

The commercial that tanked a company

Jaguar’s target market: who buys a Jaguar?

Jaguar’s main market is older conservative men, fifty or sixty plus, who have done well financially, but not quite well enough to be in the big leagues of multimillionaire sports cars. Men who see themselves as successful, but also cultured and genteel. Some cash, no flash. Think doctors, upper middle management, or your snobbish uncle who has loud opinions about saying ‘serviette’ instead of napkins. This isn’t bad: no market is bad.

But older men get older, and as your consumers die off, you need new ones. And having a product associated with older men means younger men are more unwilling to step into those shoes. Now the correct thing to do here, as I’d have told you in the boardroom myself, is to gently ‘age down’ slightly in branding to lock in 40 year old affluent men and maybe some women, but not do a total overhaul and alienate the massive main group of consumers. Just a slightly more adventurous, optimistic feel in the marketing content and a focus on creating products that had the gadgets and gizmos someone’s balding dad would feel like James Bond playing with. Not hard. But the marketing team had other ideas: they decided to target minority, disabled, left…