Blog/Analysis

Radical rebranding

Using a mixture of methods, we surveyed 1,096 respondents using quant (n = 996) and our qual-at-scale (n = 100) platform Focaldata AI on 22 November, allowing us to get detailed consumer insight in the space of just a few hours.

An overwhelming 81% of our respondents preferred the company’s now 10-year-old “It’s Good to be Bad” advertising campaign to the luxury car manufacturer’s latest effort, which consumers have branded ‘confusing’ and ‘curious’. While some appreciated the new advert’s visual appeal, many were perplexed by its apparent lack of connection to the Jaguar brand as a car manufacturer. In fact, when we played it without branding, the most common assumption was that the advert was for a fashion or clothing brand, and many even thought it was created for a paint company.

The logo’s redesign did not fare any better than the video campaign, with 83% of respondents preferring the existing logo to the radical redesign seen as ‘dull’, ‘weak’ and ‘soul-less’ by consumers. Jaguar’s ‘iconic’ and ‘elegant’ leaping logo – which has been in place in various forms for over 40 years – enjoyed massive cut-through with the public, with 79% able to correctly identify it against four other artificial Jaguar logos we tested. In contrast, the new logo was viewed as indistinctive by many.

The logo’s redesign is part of a wider sans-serif shake-up, a design trend which has seen a whole host of iconic brands like Facebook, Pinterest and Burberry shifting to simplified, sans-serif typography, emphasising digital readability over distinctiveness.

“The new logo seems less refined and personal than the old logo. With the removal of the Jaguar emblem, it doesn’t seem to stand out much” — 24-year-old, white, female

Art vs. machine

Jaguar will take some comfort in the fact that few people seem to have actually seen the advert – only around 6% of respondents knew the ad was for Jaguar when shown without branding.

However, the overall campaign, covering both the logo and video advertisement, speaks to the risk brands have in falling out of touch with their consumers. Opting for slick, often clinical imagery sometimes misunderstands the motivations behind human emotion and the subconscious factors which shape opinion. This stands in contrast to the brand identities of yesteryear, in which creative flourishes – which often served a merely ornamental purpose – provoked warmer views among consumers:

“When I saw the leaping jaguar emblem, I envisioned a company with decades of experience, making cars not just as machines, but as works of art.” — 18-year-old, male, black

“[The new logo is] cold and clinical. Not dynamic.” — 47-year-old, male, white

Most people are open-minded to change, but brands will struggle to take consumers with them if warmth is stripped from the image they project to the public. One respondent summarised this sentiment perfectly when they told us that ‘although [the logo] does look a little too old and maybe too masculine for my liking, it has character in a more unique way than the newly-presented version’.

Likewise, many interviewees praised the advert’s bright colours and cast (‘loved the diversity’), but the lack of focus and storytelling brought it down.

“It doesn’t really [...] sell a dream.” — 31-year-old, female, white

“I think it was visually very attractive but it did not give much of an indication that it was linked to Jaguar.” — 41-year-old, female, white

Culture wars

With the rebrand, Jaguar has found itself as the latest company roped into the so-called ‘culture wars’, with some interviewees taking a less nuanced and more negative tone, using the word ‘woke’ as a pejorative and hypothesising that Jaguar’s latest advert was part of some wider agenda.

“Seemed like it was getting across a political point rather than about a car.” — 37-year-old, male, mixed ethnicity

“It’s just woke gone mad and the advert has no bearing on the car, it’s just an excuse to push the woke agenda.” — 69-year-old, female, white

The crucial question for Jaguar is whether this rebrand will affect their existing or potential customer bases. It might be causing a commotion in certain social media echo chambers, but the new products will only be targeted at an exclusive group at the highest end of the income scale. With this in mind, we also tracked responses based on household income.

High-income views

High-income consumers are more likely than average to support the rebrand, but crucially still prefer the old advert and logo by large margins.

Perhaps Jaguar’s internal research among the very small subsection of the population who will be able to afford their new £100,000-plus cars points towards more favourable views of the rebrand, but the more likely story is of a brand making a misstep on the golden rule of marketing: know your audience.

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You can download this report as a PDF at the link below.