9:00 am, November 19, 2024
Jaguar unveiled a new look, logo and direction for its cars at what was quite possibly the most bizarre automotive media launch I’ve ever attended – here’s what happened.
Held at its Gaydon HQ, on Armistice Day, the event was hosted by Jaguar’s senior team including managing director Rawdon Glover and JLR’s chief creative officer Gerry McGovern.
Embargoed until today, the event felt like a hallucinogenic sci-fi movie where the presenters were only allowed to speak in marketing babble.
Unveiling a new concept car – the details of which are still under embargo until December 3 – Jaguar’s passionate team spoke for most of the day about how they plan to ‘delete ordinary’ and ‘live vivid’. Whatever that means…
In what, at times, felt like a drunken dream, Jaguar personnel walked journalists through its plans to ‘reimagine’ the much-loved brand over the next few years.
Calling it a ‘complete reset’, McGovern at one point told journalists that his team had ‘not been sniffing the white stuff – this is real’.
Jaguar’s rebirth will be electric ‘always’, said the executives. It’s confident that by the time the first of three new cars arrives in 2026, the market will have ‘shifted significantly’ towards EVs.
So much so it’s betting the house on the trio it has in the pipeline that they will be enough to reinvigorate the brand.
‘A good ice hockey player does not skate to where the puck is now, they skate to where it is going,’ chief commercial officer Lennard Hoornik said.
McGovern believes that up until now Jaguar has ‘not been allowed to be unique’ and that the Jaguar of the future will ‘stir the emotions once again’ and ‘make you feel uncomfortable’.
He was right about the last bit. After an hour’s briefing in a windowless room, the agog journalists were shifting in their seats.
After two minutes’ silence (for Armistice Day, not Jaguar) we were moved on to a house of mirrors style hallway where Jaguar’s brand design director, Richard Stevens, revealed the firm’s ‘distinct DNA’, all accompanied by a frustratingly loud spa/electronica soundtrack.
As guests tried to ignore the white noise, we were shown Jaguar’s new ‘device mark’ (or logo to everyone else).
It utilises a bespoke font and, bizarrely, combines upper and lower case letters to spell the word out as ‘JaGUar’. I fear for the pedants, this grammatical horror could be a step too far.
Next up were details of Jaguar’s new ‘Strikethrough’. This is 16 huge horizontal lines used throughout the new brand concept.
These lines are set to appear in the designs across the brand. For the assembled journalists this was illustrated with a visual demonstration that saw them walking through what can only be described as a barcode.
Further down the hallway, Stevens welcomed us to the ‘Colour World’ (look at it shine). He explained Jaguar will use red, blue and yellow from the ‘painter’s palette’, but ‘never in flat colours’.
The Jaguar heavies wanted everyone to be packed in front of the colourful screen for this element of the unveiling to be bathed in the lights for the presentation. Only a few yielded.
Then there was a display of Jaguar’s ‘maker’s marks’. This included the ‘Leaper’ – its prancing cat logo now embossed on brass and a ‘monogram’ logo that combines the letter J and R into a circle for the wheels and other subtle areas that need some branding.
The firm said it had used brass so that it can ‘age and oxidise’ over time – something the design team ‘celebrated’. All I could really envisage was owners spending their weekends polishing with tins of Brasso.
By the time we’d transitioned through Jaguar’s House of Mirrors and got to the reveal of the new concept car, some press were questioning whether they’d inadvertently been trapped in a cult’s conference. It was all incredibly bizarre.
After a fanfare of deep bassy trance and a ‘Strikethrough’ lightshow, a digital wall parted and the concept car was revealed. You’ll have to wait a couple more weeks until I can talk about what that was like.
More Jaguar
- Jaguar dealership network confirmed to shrink to ‘around 20’ showrooms
- Jaguar’s new logo combines upper and lower case letters as it doubles down on electric future
Jaguar dealers won’t escape from the changes either. Not only will there be far fewer of them – around 20 in the UK – but they’ll be upgraded to display ‘pieces of art’ in their showrooms.
Jaguar will complement its remaining few with its own manufacturer-run ‘curated brand stores’. The first will be in Paris and will neighbour the likes of Hermes, Dior and Louis Vuitton.
Dealerships will have food and beverages that are ‘completely different’ – the firm want you to think more high end retail spaces to have a coffee with places to relax. Think ‘destination’ not just car sales, say insiders.
The brand says dealers will bring Jaguars to their customers to view ‘wherever that may be’. If there’s a problem with the cars they’ll have ‘like for like mobility arranged for them’ and as for servicing, that will mean cars will be collected and dropped back to them.
Handovers of new cars will be at customers’ homes or even ‘their favourite restaurants’. But Jaguar insisted its existing client base – some 240,000 Jaguar owners in the UK – will still be catered for when it comes to repairs and approved used models.
So who’ll be buying these new Jaguars? Well, Glover says they’ll be ‘younger, more affluent, and urban livers’. They’ll be ‘cash rich and time poor’.
He described the new look Jaguar brand – which we were told (a thousand times) would be a ‘copy of nothing’ – will be ‘exuberant’, ‘modernist’ and ‘compelling’. Plus, it would have a ‘fearless creativity’ to its personality.
These are all words I have written down in my notebook, but don’t ask me what any of it means. I am not entirely sure Jaguar knows.
With this reset of the brand – which has seen it take all new cars off sale for more than a year to give customers and its dealers a ‘firebreak’ between old and new – the car maker has put everything on black and crossed its fingers.
As McGovern says, the new direction is designed to ‘stir the emotions’ and even he knows not all of those emotions will be positive.
It’s certainly a radical shift from the Jaguar that many dealers signed up to and invested tens of millions into building Dual Arch gin palace showrooms for.
There’ll be many dealers, customers and Jag lovers thinking that perhaps some of those millions spent on a new font and monograms could have been better put towards refreshing what the brand had already built.
McGovern and Glover spent a lot of time during their presentations explaining how important the brand’s history is to the firm, I just hope this brave roll of the dice doesn’t spell the end of it.
