How Jaguar lost its way – long before that controversial advert

“Jaguar has no desire to be loved by everybody,” said Gerry McGovern as he strode across the stage on a slightly chilly evening in Miami last week. It was a bold statement from Jaguar Land Rover’s creative director, but it summed up the aura around the relaunch of one of the UK’s most famous brands.

On 18 November, a short teaser ad was released that ignited social media. Lasting just 30 seconds, it showed models in bizarre and brightly coloured outfits but did not feature a single car.

The New York Post described it as “the latest example of idiotic and woke corporate virtue signalling”. Elon Musk took a dig on X, asking Jaguar’s official account: “Do you sell cars?”

Then came the actual launch at a Miami art fair. Mr McGovern stood on stage beside two cars, resplendent in “Miami Pink” and “London Blue” shades. Both were examples of Jaguar’s new Type 00 – a concept car that won’t ever go on sale, but is meant to showcase the brand’s plans for the future. Angular, aggressive, with a huge bonnet and more than a hint of Batmobile, the new design also polarised opinions.

“Even Gen Z hate the new ‘woke’ Jaguar!” declared the Daily Mail. “Mark my words, Jaguar will go bust,” Reform Party leader Nigel Farage predicted on X. But the former Top Gear presenter James May told the BBC that the fact the ad was being talked about so widely has “got to be a bit of a result for Jaguar, hasn’t it”?

Jaguar’s managing director Rawdon Glover also hit back, insisting the company needed to be “bold and disruptive” in order to get its message across.

But some insiders argue that Jaguar’s problems run deeper than a five-minute frenzy on social media.

Even before the furore over the advert, “the brand was on a steady road to nowhere”, argues Matthias Schmidt, founder of industry intelligence firm Schmidt Automotive Research.

“The traditional Jaguar demographic was slowly being diluted through natural attrition and customers jumping ship to other brands.”

So, the publicity that the ad and the launch have drawn appear to have been welcomed within the business.

As Gerry McGovern drily quipped from the stage: “We’re delighted to have your attention.”

Controversy, he added, had always surrounded British creativity when it was at its best.

Behind all the noise, what is happening at Jaguar is pretty simple. It is being re-launched as an all-electric brand as part of a major restructuring at JLR, instigated by its parent company, the Indian conglomerate Tata.

Jaguar’s current models, including the I-Pace, the E-Pace and the F-Type, are no longer being sold in the UK. Instead, the first of a new generation of cars will hit the road in 2026.

Alongside this transition to battery power comes a move upmarket, with the new models expected to cost upwards of £100,000.

The reasons for doing all this are twofold. Firstly, Jaguar has been struggling to sell enough cars or to make enough money. Secondly, JLR needs to build more electric cars to satisfy regulators, who are working to phase out the sale of new petrol and diesel models.

It’s a far cry from the brand’s glory days, when the E-Type placed Jaguar firmly at the heart of swinging-sixties British cool. Steve McQueen owned one. So did Frank Sinatra. Peter Sellers gave one to his wife, Swedish superstar Britt Ekland. George Best, who knew a thing or two about fast cars and a fast lifestyle, had several.

But for decades, the stereotype of a Jaguar buyer has been a well-to-do company boss – almost certainly male, with expensive cufflinks and a set of golf clubs in the boot. Not so long ago he might have been seen smoking a cigar as well.

That might be a little unfair on Jaguar. It has has clearly tried to appeal to female buyers and to families, with offerings such as the F-Pace. Nicknamed the “She-Type”, this was praised by Good Housekeeping magazine after its launch for its seats designed with women in mind.

But Jaguar continues to be perceived by many as a supplier of upmarket exec-mobiles – and this is a segment of the market where competition is fierce.

“They’ve been chasing BMW and Audi sales for years and despite some decent cars have struggled to be profitable,” explains Rachel Burgess, magazine editor at Autocar.

“Now, they’re trying to target the likes of Bentley and Porsche, looking at high net-worth individuals, who would be spending far more on a car than the level at which Jaguars used to be priced.”

The reinvention of Jaguar has been brewing for many years. Tata bought the brand from Ford in 2008, following nearly two decades under American ownership. During that period, Ford invested significant sums and overhauled its manufacturing and quality control processes. But it failed to make the business profitable and, at the height of the global financial crisis, put Jaguar up for sale.

After taking control of both Jaguar and Land Rover, Tata merged the two into JLR: that brought stability and removed immediate doubts over Jaguar’s future.

But while JLR has performed relatively well over the past decade, despite the downturn caused by the Covid pandemic, it is the part of the business that used to be Land Rover that has been driving recent growth.

This has been largely thanks to strong demand for luxury SUVs in markets such as North America and China, as well as in the UK.

In April, the company reported an increase in annual sales across its Range Rover, Defender and Discovery brands of nearly 25%, helping to drive revenues and profits up across the business. Jaguar’s sales did rise as well – by 7%. But that came after five years of steady decline.

In the 2018-19 financial year, Jaguar sold more than 180,000 vehicles. In 2023-24, the figure was 66,866 – a relatively small proportion of JLRs overall sales of 431,737.

By 2021, other pressures were mounting on JLR, not least the introduction of increasingly stringent environmental rules in the UK and the EU. At the time, JLR had only one electric model in its line-up, the I-Pace.

In February 2021, JLR’s chief executive Thierry Bolloré announced a new strategy: a wholesale revamp of its range, with all models to become available in electric form by the end of the decade. But crucially, he said Jaguar would be “re-imagined” as an all-electric brand.

Although Mr Bolloré would leave at the end of the following year, his plan was picked up by his successor, Adrian Mardell – who promised the company would invest £15bn to turn it into reality.

Within JLR, there is widespread recognition that something had to change.

“Jaguar’s performance over the past 10 years has been challenging,” admits Rawdon Glover. He points out that Jaguar had been trying to succeed in a high-volume market, where the bigger players can keep their costs down through economies of scale.

“While our vehicles were highly competent, and critically acclaimed, actually the ability to commercially succeed in that environment was challenging,” he says.

The move upmarket, in theory at least, gives Jaguar the opportunity to sell fewer cars, but with much bigger profit margins.

“I’m fully in agreement that they had to do something,” says Andy Palmer, an industry veteran and former CEO of Aston Martin who has also been a leading executive at Nissan.

“But it’s very brave to be planning to walk away from 85% of your customer base. They are going to have to find new customers to replace them. And acquisition of new customers is always more expensive than retaining existing ones.”

The big question, though, is whether the changes being made are the correct ones.

Arguably, one of the reasons why Jaguar’s rebrand has attracted such attention is because although relatively few people buy the actual cars, the name itself still resonates with cultural significance, thanks to a heritage going back more than seven decades.

In its early days, under founder Sir William Lyons, Jaguar was truly innovative, and it knew how to grab attention. In 1948, it launched the XK120, an elegant two-seater sports car with swooping lines and a powerful six-cylinder engine. As the name implied, it had a top speed of 120mph, making it the world’s fastest production car at the time.

In a country still recovering from the ravages of World War Two, this was a revelation. Jaguar had originally planned to build just 200, but demand was so high, it ended up making more than 12,000.

Victories in motorsport put Jaguar’s name in lights, especially at the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans – but the company continued to produce striking machines off track as well.

A number of these have stood the test of time, not least the Mark II and its successor, the S-Type. First produced in 1959, this was a luxury saloon that happened to have plenty of bad-boy appeal.

Arguably Jaguar’s greatest moment, however, came with the launch of the E-Type in 1961, which came with 150mph performance, and movie-star cachet. It was the car to be seen in and gave the Jaguar badge a lustre that lasted for decades.

But nostalgia alone will not sell cars. Jaguar has been harking back to former glories for a long time.

“I would certainly say they’ve been trading off nostalgia for decades,” says Matthias Schmidt.

Prior to the relaunch, he says Jaguar has been “like a luxury hotel that doesn’t feel the need to refurbish its brand”. He adds: “The failure to look over one’s shoulders and see what the competition is doing can be fatal.”

This week’s relaunch seems designed to get the brand out of a comfortable rut and attempt to make it edgy again, while retaining at least some of its past cachet. Or, as Gerry McGovern put it from the Miami stage, “recapture the essence of Jaguar’s original creative conviction”.

Under normal circumstances, the debut of a new car might gain a certain amount of attention in motoring magazines and websites, but it would rarely, if ever, get onto the front pages.

The company has not said who was behind the teaser ad that went viral – generating more than three million views on YouTube – but JLR has been working with Accenture’s creative marketing arm, Accenture Song, for three years.

Accenture has not commented.

Branding experts have mixed views about the campaign.

“What we had was a really bold advertising campaign, that has now been followed through seamlessly with a concept car that completely matches the campaign,” says Mark Beaumont, founder of branding agency Dinosaur.

“It is potentially a masterclass in advertising awareness”.

But Tim Parker, strategy director at Conran Design thinks it is a risky strategy. “They have indeed copied nothing that has come before in the brand’s rich heritage, but at what cost?

“Few brands ever succeed by alienating their traditional customer base over the longer term,” he continues. “If the goal is to build relevance in a crowded luxury EV market, then differentiation makes sense – but only if the underlying strategy is coherent.”

What we have not seen yet, however, or at least in any detail, is an actual road-going car. The concept is just that – an idea.

Jaguar is in the process of developing three new models, the first of which is unlikely to go on sale until late 2026. All we have been told is that it will be powerful, with more than 575hp, and have a range of more than 430 miles.

It has begun road-testing, and a handful of leaked photos show a large boxy machine that is both similar to the concept – and very different.

For any car company, trying to negotiate the transition to electric vehicles without alienating any of its customers is going to be challenging. And for a brand like Jaguar, with the scent of petrol and the sound of six and 12 cylinder engines built into its DNA, it likely to be even harder.

But among all of this is another question that hasn’t yet been asked. That is, does that DNA even matter any more – and how useful really is it when it comes to selling cars today?

Andy Palmer puts it more bluntly: Jaguar, he thinks, may well be disposable.

“I think it’s a very fair question to ask – does JLR actually need the Jaguar brand? Does the world need the Jaguar brand?”

We won’t find out the answer until 2026. In the meantime, we know what Jaguar’s plan is. Now it has to deliver.

BBC InDepth is the new home on the website and app for the best analysis and expertise from our top journalists. Under a distinctive new brand, we’ll bring you fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions, and deep reporting on the biggest issues to help you make sense of a complex world. And we’ll be showcasing thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. We’re starting small but thinking big, and we want to know what you think – you can send us your feedback by clicking on the button below.