I absolutely love the brand. I'm also conscious of the fact that it probably cannot survive exclusively on a group of people who love the brand but don't necessarily buy the cars. It's the Church of England problem, isn't it? People love the church brand. I'm not going.
I'm not going to church. I want it to exist, but I'm not going to participate. Absolutely, yeah.
Hello and welcome to Spectator TV. I'm James Heal and I'm joined today by the Spectator's Wikimane correspondent, Rory Sutherland. Rory, welcome to SpectTV. Thanks for joining us today. The subject of our discussion is Jaguar's rebrand.
Tell us what on earth they were thinking. Well, there are several components to it and there's one very big missing component, which of course is a car. And it's worth noting that Jaguar has done this. In a period where it is making, it's manufacturing no cars at all. It was a decision taken, I think, by an earlier CEO, which was effectively to do a complete reboot.
In other words, they had one electric car, which was the I-PACE, pretty well acclaimed, pretty successful, but apparently the architecture was wrong for what they were planning, or the price point was wrong. And so an earlier chief executive effectively decided, we're going to do a complete reboot. We relaunch as a wholly electric car company.
I can see half of the spectator readership fulminating away at this point. And we're also going to up the price point considerably, much, much closer to Bentley than to, I suppose there was a time when they aspired almost to be a mass car manufacturer. And they're going to abandon that completely and go pretty much to the luxurious end of the performance car market. And so what they've done is they've done this rather strange advertisement, which isn't to my taste. By the way, I've had five Jags.
You're a Jags man. Yeah, absolutely. At the moment, I have the Ford Mustang Mach-E, which I absolutely love, but I'm still persuadable. I'd consider going back to the Jag, though perhaps not at the price point they envisage.
At least not new, maybe secondhand. But it's aroused a huge amount of noise. Mostly hostile. Much of it from car purists, remember.
And I might argue to a degree, some very, very shrewd marketers, among them Mark Ritson, writing in Marketing Week, have fundamentally accused it of being tone deaf, saying that it misses, you know, Jaguar's sort of heritage points. Yes. And that the ad is kind of gratuitous, that it completely seems detached from. Both the car's British origins, which I think do matter, by the way, and I think quite a bit of Ritson's criticism is, it's possibly fair, but I'm going to reserve judgment. And the reason I'm going to reserve judgment is that they don't yet have a car.
This is, to some extent, in the realm of teaser advertising. Again, not to my taste, but nonetheless, I think, interesting. I don't dislike the new logo. They seem to have removed the snarling cat head on, which they had a technical name for, which I'm not going to share in a family broadcast.
They've kept the prancing cat. They've introduced a slightly unusual typeface, which some people hate, with a capital G in the middle of Jaguar. I don't dislike it at all.
I've had five Jaguars. To be honest, I think it's entirely in keeping with the brand to do something thoroughly revolutionary and strange, because it's done that in the past. It's done it with the E-Type, it's done it with the Mark II, the XK120, of course.
And I'd also make the point that you've got to be very, very careful, as any car manufacturer, listening too much to car people, because car obsessives often know too much. about cars to be actually helpful, in that they obsess about things that ordinary car buyers are completely indifferent about. And you might argue that the car industry, in fact, Clarkson, who I regard as a pretty interesting commentator on this, has made the point that the obsession with the Nürburgring performance has led to cars that are far less comfortable than people would really like. So you have absurd trends in the car industry, one of them being... these enormous alloy wheels with very thin and low profile tyres.
What that means is that the wheels are much more expensive, the tyres are more expensive. You're almost certain to scrape and ruin your alloys every time you enter an NCP car park and try... Navigate between the kerbs because, of course, the alloys are almost always in contact with the concrete because they're so goddamn big. They're incredibly uncomfortable.
OK, so you lose on about six dimensions. But what you would gain theoretically is if you were to go around the Nürburgring, you'd go around one and a half seconds faster because of these tires. And so we've got to be slightly careful about listening to.
Car purists talking about cars. When David Ogilvie wrote the advertisement at 60 miles an hour, the loudest thing in the new Rolls-Royce is the ticking of the electric clock. The people at Rolls-Royce were angry because he was talking about the clock, not about the drivetrain or the transmission or whatever it was they wanted him to talk about.
So it's worth noting that there are a lot of people, myself included, who love the Jaguar brand, who wanted to succeed. I think this is a bit of a new Labour moment in that for the moment. I'm not sure they'll lose the affection of their existing audience.
And I think what they're hoping to do, and as I said, I reserve judgment on their marketing simply because in the absence of a car, we don't yet know whether this is effectively hype or indeed a worthwhile drum roll for something extraordinary. What I think they're hoping to do, which I think they have to do, is to reach out to a different audience. And it's complicated by the fact that the whole normal hierarchy of car brands has been disrupted by electrification. So, I mean, okay, if you...
A lot of marketers would say, oh, well, in order to be a premium car brand, you have to have heritage. You have to have Le Mans heritage. You have to hearken back to, you know, Jim Clark.
Yeah, black and white photos. You have to have some silversmith. Photos, etc. You know, Spitfires flying in front of the White Cliffs of Dover.
That kind of imagery, which is probably relevant in Britain, but not elsewhere. They have to sell globally. That's one part of it. The second part is if you look at the success of Korean brands, which were kind of Johnny-come-latelys only six or seven years ago. They're now serious players in the electric car market.
And so we also have to face BYD and... Geely and Chinese manufacturers coming in with much lower prices. So where you go, it is fair to say that electrification does fundamentally change. As the Germans are discovering to their horror, it changes what's important about a car because they're probably all going to be pretty reliable. I'll park the range anxiety question because I think it's to some extent a bit of a distraction.
OK. They're all going to be really quiet. The performance is going to be...
I mean, if I went and bought, for example, an electric Skoda, particularly with the premium high-battery version, the performance would be sports car level in terms of the internal combustion engine. The quietness is also kind of not quite Bentley level, but it's not far off, OK? So even really, really cheap cars are going to have aspects of performance cars and aspects of luxury cars.
in terms of the quietness, the performance, and probably the reliability. So the things on which the Germans effectively built a perceptual empire of kind of engineering excellence, electrification does change that. I mean, there are plenty of other categories where a technological arrival has effectively disrupted what you might call, you know, we have a pantheon of brands in something. You know, Sony.
being, if you like, wrong-footed in video recorders by the arrival of VHS versus Betamax, for instance. There are cases where a brand's hard-won reputation does become eroded through a major technological change. And given that Jaguar decided to go all electric, and I'm going to park that decision, because, again, that's a debate for people who know far more about this stuff than I do. But given that decision... They were probably right at least to acknowledge they're going to be operating in a different place.
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But given that, and the fact that electricity and electrification mean that instead it's going to be much more of an even playing field in that sense of reliability. Surely things like the idiosyncrasies, like the English brand, the Englishness, the thing that ought to be preserved. And that was what's so striking to me, by the way, is so striking is watching it is how homogenous the advert seems.
The sort of identity is gone. And I worry perhaps from Jaguar is going to lose that English. Everything that you think of as being evocative, as English as it is. I mean, as I said, it's emphatically not my kind of advertising.
Equally, it is partly simply by dint of the absence of a car. It's uncharacteristic for car advertising. There's a whole question, by the way, about where cars compete in the electric world, in the sense that, as I said, fairly basic cars are going to be as fast as a normal person would want to go, accelerating as much as a normal person would want to drive. and as quiet as a sane person could hope for.
There are those benefits. So where do you go? Now, speaking to the guy who's the expert at Wired magazine on electric cars, he wondered whether it becomes all about the interior. In other words, is it all about the design?
Is it all about the aesthetics? Not a bad thing, actually. I mean... You know, when car manufacturers really competed on aesthetics, you know, we got the 56 Cadillac and we had, you know, we had the glorious fins.
We had, you know, you know, in some ways a bit more variety in appearance with cars would be a pretty welcome thing because they have, you know, they have become tragically homogeneous in terms of how they look. And what was so striking for me from this conversation is that, you know, people have talked about. jaguar and their head of marketing and what the internal culture of jaguar is but really is that this is something happening across the industry and sort of baby jaguar by dint of events have been forced first through that wall well i'm also going to be a bit cautious here because there are a lot of instances where car people particularly purists hate things and then admit they're wrong um uh so for example i do have quite a lot of faith in the creative director of jaguar given that he was the man behind the defender.
Now, a lot of purists absolutely despised the Defender when it arose because they thought it should be a farmer's stroke military vehicle. And here we have this semi luxury vehicle. Yes, I get it, by the way. I sort of agree with them with my car purist hat on. I think they're right.
Nonetheless, it's a magnificent vehicle which seems to be selling incredibly well and it looks fantastic. OK, people hated Chris Bangle when he took over. design director at BMW. I think some of his work, particularly with the benefit of hindsight, actually turns out to be, I nearly said iconic. I'm not going to say, but it was actually an extraordinarily important part of, I think, the reinvention of a great brand.
And so you have to keep these things fresh. You have to fundamentally innovate quite dramatically. And there will always be people who, in a sense, if you absolutely love steam train. OK, I agree with you. You're right.
I agree with the people who love internal combustion engines, who love, you know, a little bit of oil leaking onto the floor. I understand all of that. But perhaps those people shouldn't be put in charge of a railway, if you sort of mean.
And so ultimately. What do you do? Volvo is perhaps in a similar kind of position. Volvo always describes itself as we're a 1% car company. We have 1% of market share.
And they've, if you like, cornered a thing I sort of call Lutheran luxury, which is it's highly luxurious, but in a very minimalist, Protestant, Scandinavian way. Okay. Jaguar, I think you're right about the Britishness. I think Mark Ritson's right about the Britishness of the thing, which is they shouldn't turn their back on that simply because there are large parts of the world where that still really matters. I mean, Britain's brand strength is pretty good.
There are also a whole bunch of very rich people who, for reasons simply of differentiation, don't want to drive a Mercedes, you know. And so Aston Martin, Bentley, Jaguar, have all sort of i suppose had the capacity to appeal to those people and just as a final question where i wonder uh what went through your mind in deciding to buy those five jaguars what were the kind of motivations for them what were you thinking when you thought jaguar i want one of those um they are slightly raffish yes um uh which i quite like um however i absolutely love the brand but i'm also conscious of the fact that i have i'm 59 okay actually it's not a that's actually Actually, comparatively slightly young for the buyer of new cars. We've got to remember that the people who buy new cars are old, overwhelmingly.
My brother was also and is a Jag enthusiast, and he's now got an I-Pace, which he's delighted with. It was a very, very good car in many ways. I absolutely love the brand.
I'm also conscious of the fact that it probably cannot survive. exclusively on A group of people who love the brand but don't necessarily buy the cars. We've got to be very careful about this. The Church of England problem, isn't it?
I love the brand. I'm not going. I'm not going to church.
I want it to exist, but I'm not going to participate. And that's actually very common with cars. There are an awful lot of car brands which I would never buy, but I would be saddened if they disappeared.
I still don't like going to France quite as much anymore. because there aren't two CVs all over the place, you know. In many ways, it was a bloody awful car. But nonetheless, you know, there are lots of things I'm really, really glad that they exist, but I'm not necessarily going to pay for them.
And I think you've got to be careful about that, because with car brands, particularly car brands, everybody's a commentator. It gets really complicated with brands. One of the things I think they are a little bit guilty of, and I'm totally with my friend Mark Ritson on this, is that they're not just a brand. is probably turning your back on a bit too much in the same way that British Airways did, which is British Airways is called British Airways, for God's sake, you know. It is fairly obviously a British airline.
And there is that question with brands that try to be a citizen of everywhere. Who was it? Theresa May. Theresa May. If you want to be a citizen of everywhere, you end up as a citizen of nowhere.
And for brands, there's probably a little bit of truth in that, that I don't think they should... They should... turn their back on on that but where i slightly disagree with the kind of critics is i'm i'm reserving judgment because i'm still waiting for the car i don't think brands without products uh you know are really a thing um i don't i personally don't dislike their design treatment it's difficult to judge in the absence again of the actual product itself so we're making a decision about a brand in the absence of the thing to which it's attached Of course, cognitively, the two are inseparable, right? But why I reserve judgment as well is that I, yes, I accept, I think some of the criticism is right. The ad is not the ad I would have made or chosen to have made.
But I do think there is a kind of seismic shift in the world of car brands, which is a necessary. consequence simply of, well, the Chinese, okay? If you think about it, to some extent, you know, 100 years of German credibility in terms of, you know, powertrains and engineering has been rendered slightly irrelevant in the same way that saddle makers had to reinvent themselves, okay?
I think Hermes was a saddle maker, if we're talking about luxury brands, is that right? I've got a vague memory that Hermes started as a French saddle maker and realized that actually That was a little bit of a dying market. So they went into luxury leather goods and from then on, so on and so forth. And I think something like that's happening in the car industry, much as a lot of purists would like to resist it.
I don't think we can actually fight that. Well, a bit like Rolls-Royce as well, you know, in terms of what it ended up doing. I do feel Rolls-Royce, there is a comment I will make.
I'm going to be careful here. Rolls-Royce is a bit like the British private school system. which is it has abandoned its core audience, okay? So I don't know anybody British who drives a Rolls-Royce anymore.
I used to know a few British people who would have them. And it has become a kind of luxury car for the world's plutocrats or mega-rich or whatever. And I kind of do think that if this vehicle looks weird parked outside Chatsworth, you've lost something.
In the same way that I think the British public school system where the headmaster on July the 27th is on a flight to Shanghai or Dubai to basically drum up the next year's intake. It's a perfectly sensible move up to a point. But if you actually become entirely rootless, you actually no longer, you're no longer selling the thing that was appealing to those people in the first place. It's a sort of Wimbledonisation element to it in Western Australia. Perfect.
So see the overseas, etc. Well, we hope to see next week's car, and we'll see if Jaguar does keep its business. How long is it before the car is revealed? I was checking the date.
I don't know off the top of my head. I think it's Miami. I've got a vague idea that it's some motor show in Miami, but I may be wrong. Well, hopefully at that point we can get your views, and you can tell us what you think of the actual car as well.
Rory Southerland, thank you very much for joining us on Spectator TV. Pleasure as ever. Thank you very much indeed.