How hate and homophobia made a genius of Jaguar’s rebrand
Opinion: "When Elon Musk, Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate take against you because of a typeface and a bright dress, be thankful," writes Attitude publisher Darren Styles OBE
You don’t yet know too much about Jaguar’s rebranding because the Coventry carmaker hasn’t yet said a lot, but I bet you’ve heard the word on the (social) street. How the “woke” and the “gay” have done for an automotive institution, how on sight of a teaser trailer without any Jaguar product in it Elon Musk asked “do you build cars?” And that such valued opinion formers as Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate, while in and out of prison cells various, declared they’d never buy a Jaguar again.
This seems like excellent news for anyone selling Jaguars.
If that seems like a lot of fuss over the adoption of a sans serif typeface and a random capitalised G (which I admit triggers anxiety in my inner proofreader), and some saturated colour imagery of folk in very fashion-forward attire encouraging us to “live vivid”, “delete ordinary” and “copy nothing”, then it is. After all, this was meant to be a minor precursor to prepare the world for a Jaguar design concept as yet unseen – at least until the unveil at Miami Art Week in the small hours of 3 December, UK time. And that, believe me, is very much the main event.
What has transpired, however, in short days, is a reaction to the tiniest teaser details that started with raised eyebrows and finished with a full-on hate campaign, laced with homophobia, pouring out across social and national media for the Jaguar brand and a member of its senior team. It’s as bizarre as it is ridiculous, but by virtue of Attitude’s longstanding partnership with Jaguar and the Attitude Awards – dating back nine years now – we’ve had both a front row seat and some inside track.
A week ago, I was sat with a number of other media types within Jaguar’s inner sanctum (a state-of-the-art complex in Warwickshire called Gaydon, ironically) and the rebrand back-story was rolled out before us. We saw the new logo, the maker’s mark, the tweaking of the iconic leaping cat and lots of cool people wearing strong colours defining the word of the moment: exuberance. And then, via a Squid Games-esque trot down corridors, past mirrors and strobe lights, we came to doors that eventually parted to reveal the new design vision, the first all-new New Jaguar.
I’m under NDA until the car’s reveal and so can’t say much more about it, if anything. Bar (I think) this: it’s a “fuck me” moment. I’ve written about cars for almost 40 years, and it’s the most shocking reveal since the Lamborghini Countach, and maybe the Jaguar E-Type before that. A copy of nothing, they promised. And it is. It’s bedroom poster stuff, it’s Gran Turismo fodder made real. It’s a reason to be very, very excited.
What it isn’t is “gay” or “woke”. In fact, one sometime GQ writer accosted the Jaguar team after and suggested they’d created a car “so masculine that no woman would ever want to drive one.” Which is palpable nonsense as gender identities have shifted a bit in recent years, but if you were looking for a different perspective then that rather screws the hysterical narrative that has developed since.
Which is where I came in. So utterly insane has been the tsunami of outrage, awash with faux Jaguar owners selling or never buying cars they never owned or intended to buy, that social media outrage tipped into a witch hunt for the perpetrator. And, of course, the Daily Mail delivered.
Using the basis of a speech at the Attitude Awards in October, by Jaguar Director Santino Pietrosanti, it focuses on what he said about DEI and diversity groups – women in engineering and those who are neuro-divergent among them – and washes over the fact he was speaking at a diversity event hosted by the world’s largest LGBTQ+ media brand. Robbed of context save for reference to Santino’s “sparkly shirt,” it then draws a line straight back to Jaguar’s “woke rebranding.”
For good measure, we are told “the American marketing guru who masterminded Jaguar’s woke rebrand” is Black Lives Matter-supporting Santino from New York, who has a Scottish husband and a cockapoo named Mia – in other words, we’ve ripped through his Facebook profile in a piece of exclusive from-the-desk investigation – and can now publish his personal details including where he lives and the value of his house. So if you are as illiberal, ignorant and anti being pro people of colour, pro women in engineering, pro supporting the neuro-divergent and pro-LGBTQ+ as the Daily Mail is, here they propose is who get after to create the next “Bud Light” moment.
The lightning rod duly delivered, and one (unapologetically gay) man and the brand he represents are at the centre of a manufactured firestorm. And it will be his fault Jaguar goes bust, they promise. The homophobia, implied and actual, the anti-woke agenda, making corporate life personal – the Mail’s glee at playing attack dog within a minority community drips from every word.
Except. Except for two things.
Firstly, when – four years ago – Jaguar announced a programme to reimagine the brand’s position and product from the ground up, most industry-watchers nodded sagely. The carmaker was losing £1 for every £3 its Land Rover sister was making. Sales of a range of perfectly nice cars were in decline (180,000 sales in 2018 became 60,000 sales last year) and a step-change was as desirable as it was necessary. Frankly, Jaguar was looking towards bust already.
Secondly, the reimagine strategy – understanding that if you do what you’ve always done you end up with what you’ve always had – was to embark upon a transformation so radical, so dramatic that it shocked life into a brilliant but diminished brand. A brand whose products its late founder, Sir William Lyons, said years ago should be “a copy of nothing.”
What was needed was a reinvention so brave, so loud, so beyond what would be expected of Jaguar that it was all anyone was talking about. Adapt or die. So that when a car was unveiled at a six-figure price point to sell in limited volume but at an actual profit, Jaguar’s first in decades, the world would snap to attention.
Get it now? Google ‘how algorithms work’ when you get a minute. And thanks for stopping by Elon, Nigel, Tommy and Andrew.
3 December, 01:00. Don’t go to bed: you need to be woke for this bit at least.
Darren Styles OBE has been writing about cars for almost 40 years, is gay, lives with his partner Tom and two dogs – Arthur and Dibbles – in a house worth £1m in the countryside. He has placed a deposit on a New Jaguar.