The managing director of Jaguar has mounted a robust defence of the car company’s much-discussed rebrand.
Rawdon Glover, who has been with Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) for 12 years and steering the Jaguar business since 2023, was interviewed by Jon Evans on his Uncensored CMO podcast. The episode was titled, Jaguar Relaunch – Genius or Marketing Madness?
Last year, Jaguar unveiled a controversial rebrand, and a few weeks later its new concept car, the Type 00. It became the big design story of the year, and while the brand insisted it needed to make sweeping changes to attract new buyers, many people were shocked by the new designs.
But Glover told Uncensored CMO that Jaguar should be a brand that divided opinion.
“A new Jaguar shouldn’t land and everybody goes, yeah that’s nice,” he said. “We are fine with polarising. What we shouldn’t do is try and be loved by everybody… you’ll end up with vanilla – six, seven out of ten.”
The commercial strategy behind the new car, Glover explained, is to sell “relatively small numbers at elevated price points.” In that context, he said that having some people love, and some people hate, the new design isn’t a problem.
And he drew a comparison with the launch of the E-Type in 1961, which also caused some controversy. “That’s Jaguar at its very best,” Glover said. “That’s what Jaguar should do.”
Glover said he and the team were unconcerned by the furore around the rebrand, because a key part of the marketing strategy was “to get people saying, ‘What is going on at Jaguar’?”
“We just wanted people to acknowledge that Jaguar was doing something that was different,” he said. “The whole purpose of that two-week build-up was to get as many eyeballs as possible on the unveiling of the new design language.”
The new Jaguar logo, by Jaguar Land Rover’s in-house design team
Despite Glover’s upbeat analysis, there were reports earlier this year that JLR was reviewing its relationship with Accenture Song given the reaction to the new branding. Glover wasn’t asked about this, and it’s not clear if the two parties are still working together.
The need for change
Glover said that the bold departures of the new designs – both of the visual identity and the cars themselves – were necessary, given the challenges facing Jaguar when they embarked on this work.
He mentioned the massive changes in both the technological landscape, with electrification and self-driving vehicles, and the competitive landscape, notably in terms of Asian manufacturers.
Taking into account “the dynamics of our brand, the age profile of our client base, and I guess, candidly, the commercial performance of the brand,” Glover says there was a need for revolution, rather than evolution.
“The answer clearly wasn’t to tweak here or tweak there,” he said. “We needed to make a big change. We needed a complete reset.”
It’s been suggested the new electric Jaguars, which will launch next year, will cost around £100,000, and the brand hopes between 80 and 90% of buyers will be first-time Jaguar owners.
Glover says he understands that Jaguar “is one of the industry’s most cherished icons” and that they hope to take existing buyers with them into Jaguar’s new era. But he was clear that attracting new, younger consumers is the main priority.
“It was very clear from the demographics of our previous client base, we needed to attract a new audience,” he said.
A new design language
Given the size of the strategic shift Jaguar wanted to make, Glover says they had to “deconstruct and rewire” people’s existing associations with the brand.
And some of the design choices were “quite straightforward” as they shifted into an EV-focused future.
For example the growling cat logo had “connotations with throbbing combustion engines” and “didn’t make sense” on an electric vehicle.
The leaping cat – known as the leaper – was retained, but Glover said it needed to be contextualised within the new visual direction.
“How do we reinvent the leaper to look appropriate in the context of that new design language?” he said.
That led to the development of the strikethrough, the 18 horizontal lines which surround the leaper which now appears in the negative space within that set-up. It also led to a new type system, with a mix of upper and lower case letters, which Glover said creates “beautiful symmetry and circular consistency” and, in the future, will “open up all sorts of interesting artistic abstraction.”
The new Jaguar maker’s mark, by Jaguar Land Rover’s in-house design team
Glover also discussed the unusual design process which JLR used to create the Type 00. Rather than engineers creating a brief, they started with a design competition involving the whole JLR design team.
“There’s a really large pool of talent, and we had a competitive process, where effectively they were all given the same brief, and they had three months to explore creatively,” he explained.
They ended up with 17 full-size vehicles, made of clay but painted to look like production models, featuring four different design languages. “The purpose of that really was to make sure there was tension in the process,” Glover said.
The Type 00 concept models were launched in Miami Pink and London Blue, and Glover said these colour choices were an important part of the “brand world” they wanted to create. “We want it to be exuberant, we want it to be visceral,” he said.
He is aware that production models often end up looking and feeling very different to the concept cars, with “all the joy and the all the fun” often missing in the final designs. But Glover is confident that won’t happen with the new Jaguars.
“I’m really close to the production car – I don’t think anybody’s going to be disappointed,” he said.
Copy nothing
The long gap between the brand and concept launches, and the arrival of the new models was also a deliberate strategy, Glover explained.
“We could have waited much closer to when actually the vehicle will be on sale,” he said. “But we need to spend this time to tell people that actually Jaguar isn’t perhaps what they perceive it to be, and reposition the brand. So that’s why we went as early as we did.”
And he is confident that when people see the new cars in person, the overarching strategy will all come together.
He referenced “copy nothing,” the phrase adopted by Jaguar’s founder, Sir William Lyons, which was widely-used (and often pilloried) in last year’s rebrand.
“When everybody else is going this way, Jaguar has got to have the strength of its convictions to do something completely different,” Glover said. “The spirit of what we’re doing with this re-imagination of Jaguar is entirely in keeping with that philosophy and that, and I think when you see them on the road… it’s going to have an incredible reaction.”
And he seems happy to be driving through such big changes, despite the backlash.
“The best bit of career advice I ever had was don’t sit on the comfy chair,” he told Evans.
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00
The new Jaguar Type 00