Has Jaguar got their rebrand right?

Uncategorized Jul 18, 2025

When you write a book called Rebrand Right, you can guess the first question every journalist throws at you: “So did Jaguar get their rebrand right?”

So here's my take on the question. 

It's easy to go along with the naysayers and the shock headlines. And last week’s headlines were loud: “Jaguar sales crater 98% after ‘woke’ rebrand”. Just 49 cars sold in Europe. Cue the outrage.

But here’s what most coverage missed — Jaguar isn’t shocked. In fact, this sharp sales drop was expected. It’s part of a bold, deliberate strategy.

The real story? Jaguar is no longer producing most of its current models. The company is winding down its legacy lineup to make way for an all-new brand vision: a leap into the ultra-luxury electric vehicle space.

Buried at the bottom of many of those viral articles is a crucial line: “We are no longer producing models in 2025 and very low inventory is available.”

This isn’t a collapse. It’s a controlled demolition — the kind a brand makes when it’s preparing for total reinvention.

Jaguar isn’t just discontinuing its lineup – it’s stepping away from a business model that wasn’t working.  This is a brand making a bold, strategic leap: shifting into a new, adjacent category – ultra-luxury electric vehicles – with a different price point, a different buyer, and a very different offer.

If the economic model you have isn’t working, and the brand is no longer relevant to buyers - you have to act in a dramatic way. As the CEO said: “We had to do something that would enable us to cut through and make the brand more relevant and desirable again,” says Glover. “When we started on this journey to reinvent Jaguar, we said we had to be disruptive, brave and fearless and change people's perceptions of what the brand stands for.”

Think about other category transitions like on-prem to cloud, landline to mobile. In each case, established companies had to reposition from a place of relative weakness – to be seen as a valid player in this new world. They were up against fresh, dynamic new competitors doing bold things - like Salesforce and Apple - while having to plant seeds for a future customer who didn’t yet see them as relevant. Jaguar is doing the same. Their existing buyers had largely stopped believing the brand was for them. In situations like this little brand tweaks aren’t going to cut it. It’s a reinvention.

So yes – it’s bold. And yes – it’s unfamiliar. But sometimes a business and category changes so fundamentally that your brand has to change dramatically to move with it.

And let’s not forget: brands that don’t make the leap often don’t survive the change. Think of:

Kodak – dominated film, missed digital

Blockbuster – owned video rental, ignored streaming

BlackBerry – pioneered smartphones, dismissed touchscreens

Nokia – massive mobile player, slow to pivot to smart

MySpace – early social giant, lost to better UX and vision

Now - it's not to say that their strategy isn't a risk.  But sometimes a big bold brand change can drag the business with you.

IBM are a great example of this. They have navigated huge industry shifts over their history. In 1992 they were tanking – they’d lost $8.1bn that year. But the new leader Lou Gerstner envisaged a coalescing of all the different parts of IBM into a vast platform that could better serve their customers. The company launched a massive marketing campaign around the term “e-business” to establish IBM’s capabilities and thought leadership in the space.

Were they operating that way inside the business at the moment of launch? No. But the brand change was the spark that fuelled an epic comeback. From 1994 to 2000, revenue grew nearly 40%, to more than USD 88 billion, and net income nearly tripled.

“We found our voice, our confidence and our ability once again to drive the industry agenda,” Gerstner wrote. “Our messaging allowed our customers to see benefits and value that were not being articulated by our competitors. The vast new challenges of networked computing reenergized IBM Research and triggered a new golden age of technical achievement for the company.”

Back then, IBM wasn’t the obvious choice for internet-era leadership. But it made a bold bet, coining and owning the idea of “e-business” before most people understood what it meant. They got out ahead of the market, repositioned the brand, and used it to reframe the entire value of what they sold.

Business strategy typically leads brand strategy but when it's the other way around it can help you get out ahead of the market and reverse your decline.

So am I saying Jaguar have done the right thing? Have they got their rebrand right?

Well, I find it really arrogant for anyone to claim they know the answer to this. I haven’t seen the brand diagnosis for starters. That's where you have to start in any rebrand (and that's where we start in the book Rebrand Right). Clearly the Jaguar team did a brand diagnosis. But one thing the CEO said recently signalled that perhaps they took the rebrand a little too far. In an interview with Autocar Glover said that their research indicated,

“We should take Jaguar back to a positioning of when it was much more successful in the marketplace and really try and restore that real lustre that the brand definitely had, and we definitely see. That’s why the brand still has such a strong affinity. But the interesting thing about Jaguar is most of the affinity tends to be with what we’ve done historically, not what we’ve been doing recently.”

What isn’t clear in their rebrand is how and where they have built on this historical affinity. In Rebrand Right we talk about the importance of maintaining things that are both familiar and positive. We frame thus under the bigger point that there are four factors that build strong brands and cohesion is one of them. (You can read about all four for free here). Perhaps keeping the Jaguar symbol might have retained some of this affinity. It’s hard to see what else they have retained other than the name.

As Rachel and I said, in this Management Today article on rebranding.

"When you're fresh into a rebrand, it's very exciting", says Robb. "There's this natural desire to start again and do everything differently. But one thing that often goes radically wrong with rebrands is that everything gets thrown out. Yet the psychology of the mere exposure effect means that people trust, prefer, and pay more attention to brands that they recognise and are familiar with. You shouldn't burn what's gone before; you need to know which elements to protect."

That said, Jaguar will have done their homework. This is a company making a tough, necessary move. They’ve done their diagnosis. They’re taken some bold decisions. They defined a future. Did they get their Rebrand Right? We won’t know until sales start. The 49 sales of a discontinued line is not the right measurement for this. Only time will really tell.

If you want to get your rebrand right - here’s the perfect place to start.

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