Resembling something of the cast of The Hunger Games, Jaguar’s rebrand was met with a barrage of criticism when it was unveiled last week.
With a cast dressed in exuberant clothing and without a car in sight, the brand has certainly earned our attention. But whether that’s for the right reasons, is up for debate.
Jaguar is in fact teasing its relaunch as an electric-only retailer and has plans to unveil its new design concept in Miami next month. Many will be watching and waiting to see if the new cars live up to the hype and hyperbole of the social media tease.
It’s not just the ad that has got people’s knickers in a twist but the logo and the entire look, feel and positioning is such a huge shake-up of the traditional British brand, that they appear to have forgotten to take their core audience with them on the journey.
There is a school of thought that all publicity is good publicity but I’d argue that you really want your potential customers to be discussing your products/service and not your branding directly. Without a product, everyone can only discuss their new marketing collateral. Jaguar apparently needed to make some bold changes in light of dropping sales. It’s a big risk and one only hopes that the new motors live up to the huge advance publicity.
At this point, it’s good to note that rebrands are not generally the sort of thing that any journalist worth their salt wants to cover. Yes, a few niche trades in a specific sector may pick up on a new colour or a new font but it’s really rare for a rebrand to get any national column inches unless it’s bad news for the brand.
A similarly poorly-received rebrand earlier in the year was The Nottingham Building Society. For many years the mutual held dear the connection to its roots in the city, with the logo featuring the iconic image of Robin Hood.
However, ‘The Nottingham’ as it was once known, offers products and services more broadly than in just its home county, so it understandably wanted to add the ‘building society’ descriptor back in to be more easily understood in a wider context.
However, while that step is easily justified, the transition to a squiggly new N for Nottingham is trickier to understand. It’s quite hard to determine what it actually is, which is why I described it as a ‘squiggle’. Perhaps it’s a knot, wobbly handwriting, or maybe a twist because the company’s statement said it had mixed its rich history with a modern twist. But I’m struggling to understand why there was any need to ditch Robin altogether. Couldn’t a measly arrow have been included as a nod to the old?
In a bid to presumably appeal to a younger audience, it described the rebrand as a ‘glow up’. Eugh.
What unites these two rebrands, is the seeming oblivion to their current customers and audiences. Haven’t they heard the marketing adage that it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than to win a new one? Ideally keeping existing clients and winning new ones is the holy grail but you have to take your customers with you. And in the case of a mutual such as Nottingham Building Society, where the customers are known as ‘members’ and own the organisation, it’s a marketing sin to overlook so much heritage and goodwill.
So what are the key learnings from these two rebrands?
Both are British to their core – albeit Jaguar is now owned by Tata Motors – but in making such radical changes to their brand, seem to have completely overlooked their Britishness and their history.
Neither brand has been quoted on record as saying that their current customers were on board with the changes. But had research been undertaken it could have been a way to curb the media and social media reaction.
As any designer knows, colours, shapes, fonts and logos are subjective and even when seated in the most robust strategy, if a CEO takes against a design decision, it will get filed in the bin. Everyone has an opinion about design but both companies could have given grounds for such a radical overall if they had (most of their) customer base on board.
In response to criticism of the Jagaur rebrand from Nigel Farage, the company’s CEO retorted that ‘People like Farage are not our core customer’. But if your existing customers aren’t keen and you’re not attracting new ones, that’s a one-way street into administration.
There is, of course, an interesting debate to be had about whether a brand refresh was actually required at all, but let’s assume that they did. Both had a loyal following and the brands had admirably deep roots in the British psyche. So did they need to go all in? Only time will tell but I’m not a fan of radical for radical’s sake. My advice is to look backwards as well as forward when rebranding and always involve your existing customers as they will undoubtedly keep you in check on the former.
