oren meets world: jaguar's rebrand: death of the marketing middle class?

We need to get to the bottom of what is going on because big brand marketing, big brand branding has gotten bad. It is either feast or famine. In this video, we're gonna talk about the new rear brand of Jaguar, or Jaguar, however you prefer to pronounce it. Key cultural topics like is Jaguar a brat? Break down by contrast brands that are evolving in a good way. Look at the attention-getting industrial complex of 2024, 2025. Talk about the strategies brands should be considering when they're going into approaching a new look and feel. And then talk about the contrast of nostalgia and the future that we're trapped in when we have these type of conversations. Ever been interested in marketing and rebrands or passionate about cars and the future and looks of where they're going? Or just wanna understand why marketing in general has often gotten so bad? We're gonna hit all that inside this video. But first, this is the scenario that we're in. This is the video released by Jaguar. Create exuberance, live vivid, delete ordinary, break molds, copy nothing. I am never gonna get that 30 seconds of my life back. So this accompanies this logo change of Jaguar. Much more simple, streamlined interface. As our friends at Outlander point out, this is a common theme of brands that have continually blended over time because they think that's what consumers want or it makes it easier to do their logo applications, et cetera. But this video and approach by Jaguar has the internet in an up, and over a few things. One is the complete tone-deaf nature of this ad, right? This is a perfect example of when you go to an ad agency and ask, what does Gen Z want? And it's all these unique personas. It's unknown, you know, this entire ad could be AI. I'd be like, all right, I believe it. You know, unique looks, bright personalities, whatever. This is what a lot of agencies and executives think that people want. They want blending, they want future forward, bright colors and fruit. When I had my worst marketing video, I talked about how Coca-Cola Spiced had like giant fruits in their attempt to attract Gen Z. But they are operating in a parallel universe from reality. This is a set of agencies who are now seven months late to the brat trend who are asking, can we make Jaguar brat? Here's what this zeitgeist looks like. This is someone saying, hey, people don't like Tesla because Elon Musk. Tesla is the vehicle of conservatives. Let's become the anti-Tesla. Let's be as flamboyant as we can. And with that, moving into a marketing sphere that actually markets to no one because the people who are in that zone appreciate well done and sophisticated things as much as the people that don't. And so you end up in an attention grab that only gets attention because of the negativity presented upon. But then they follow up with the vehicle. They were unveiling this on the 2nd of December. And then this has been the look and feel that they've seen driving around in camo. This is where this conversation gets interesting. I, like everyone on the internet, think that that ad was absolutely terrible. We'll get to the rebrand and the core of it in a second. And I actually like some of that. I am very intrigued by the look and feel of this. I'm also very intrigued by the look and feel of this photo. And I do feel like, even if this is one of the worst videos ever, if it hypes up this much attention, if there is a sick vehicle at the end of it that people go, that is outrageous, or that is something I want to drive, then the attention and eyeballs that come from all this negativity on the internet will actually have served them well in having people really looking at what is gonna come from this release. Was that their intention? Probably not. If it was, they're certainly playing some 4D chess that we were not expecting. But now everything hinges on this December 2nd release of this vehicle. And I do predict that we're gonna see a lot of people do purposely bad ads, having seen this happen with Jaguar, to then follow up and say, ha ha, guess what, that was a troll, and then release a new campaign or a different look and feel because they're seeing how the attention industrial complex shifts to bash on this Jaguar item so much so that it creates a moment of brand recognition unlike what this brand has had in, I don't know, decades? And then I was DMing with someone who was asking me if I was gonna have an opinion about this, who was saying that they saw a reading where Jaguar was saying they only expect 15% of their existing customer base to come with them on this new journey. So they are doing a radical repositioning. And look, this is obviously a good thing. Jaguar is nothing like what it used to be. It's not a car people are frequently considering buying. I think the best thing they had going forward is I believe that they were Waymo cars, so at least it was tech adjacent, and I think they lost that contract to like Hyundai or somebody. They need this redo, they need this refresh. A drastic change is likely a good one. I'll talk about some of those angles coming up in the video of taking a future forward approach versus a nostalgic approach. And now they certainly have all eyes upon them for what's gonna happen. But before I get into this and an example of a good version of this that's happening with Porsche, we're gonna talk about why bad stuff like this happens. Why are agencies and big brands so bad right now? Why does stuff like that terrible North Face campaign that we saw with like the AI manifesto happen to such a legendary brand? And it's because of the death of the marketing middle class. So there's all these people right now that should be director and VP of marketing, people between the ages of 30 and 40, who have quickly realized if you have a great skillset in marketing, you can do good paid marketing, you are a marketing leader, you are a solid content creator, influencer, manager, you can make far more money by being an entrepreneur or being a co-founder or being a creator than you can at those typical jobs. And that leaves this gap. All those people that would normally be mentoring the younger generation of marketers, that layer is now gone. And this is a very real thing because if you are one of those people that has that skillset, you have a paid marketing skillset or a content creation skillset, you are worth an absolute ton of money, significantly more than many times anyone else in the company. Those people have gone entrepreneurial. And then the people that are left, there's plenty of them who still say, hey, I wanna work for whatever reason. They now get their choice because of all these people exiting of all the cool brands, right? Would you rather work for Rode or Hexclad or ALD or brands doing really cool and exciting stuff and put your toolkit to use there? Or would you rather be at some stagnant agency? And would you rather be at a small agency doing cool work or a medium-sized agency or be going to the sashis of the world where you're not gonna be doing that kind of work and you're gonna be trapped in the system or even working in the Jaguars where no one's gonna listen to you? You're not. You're going to these places where you can still get compensated really well and do interesting work. And this is a significant departure from where marketing people lived in the past. And because of this gap, you have a lot of Gen Z people who know they know better. They say, hey, I know what's going on in the culture. Hey, I know how to do content. I know whatever. But they don't have the experience or the management expertise and don't have the coaching to be able to communicate that to the C-suite. And there's this general sense of entitlement that happens in every younger generation where people think, oh, they think they can just jump these jobs without having to work. And you have the C-level people who can't understand the Gen Z people, don't know how to justify the actions that are happening, don't really know what's going on on the ground or completely disconnected from the TikTokification of the world we have now who can't make solid decisions. This happens again, agency level and brand level, which leads to a dearth of good decisions and a feast or famine mentality. Your brand either gets it or it does not get it. And Jaguar does not get it. Does that mean that they may not be successful? No, never know. And a lot of cases, product heals all wounds. Let's look at an example of what good car marketing looks like. So I found it interesting that at the same time we debuted this Jaguar scenario, Porsche and ALD are doing a marketing effort for a collaboration there. Now this is obviously a, this is marketing right there. They're selling multi-thousand dollar bags and jackets by applying the Porsche lifestyle to it. But they're creating beautiful looking vehicles, the true nature of luxury, both in the product development itself and the adjacent product development of what ALD is selling in the presentation of the product in the styles that they devotes. This was the video that they were debuting while we're seeing the other Jaguar video, where they're really playing into the exact opposite. We got an old dude corralling his sheep while we roll through the mountaintops in Ireland or wherever we're at. And they brought the yaks out. And they are telling a much more nostalgic, familiar story that is synonymous with performance and synonymous with what people are interested in and how people spend money, especially inside this core demographic. Now, Jaguar may have said, hey, we actually can't compete with this. There's no way we're gonna be able to. I don't think they're necessarily correct, but that could be a angle that you take as you ascertain this. And luckily my man doesn't hit the sheep here and able to break safe. Just a couple of gentlemen. Having a moment. The sheep part ways and they continue. But this is very much the moment that is happening right now. We are in the nostalgic era. And there's so many brands that are looking future forward when they should be looking backwards. And I think there's only two ways you can really approach it. Nostalgia or deep future. This is living in the nostalgia era, and that's fine. Most of what we are, I had some serious thoughts about Kith and Nike and their approach to the Olympics I talked about in my worst marketing video, where everyone's trying to do some current things. And Kith was literally just like, you know what's in the Zeitgeist right now? Just rerun the exact 80s and 90s shirts and designs that people were wearing. That's what people like, because that's what people are into right now. There's a whole world around connection and nostalgia that has not gone away, is still on trend and still works. And if you are a brand with a rich history, like you have the choice to do something forward or do something nostalgic. And if you go forward, I feel like you have to go deep forward. I'll talk about what that means, but it's far easier. And what I think they should do is go back. So we look at these ad examples here of what Jaguar presentation used to look like. And I think if you even take some of the look and feel of some of the vehicles and were to present it like that and saying, hey, we are actually gonna make our line look like our line and lean into true British heritage. They really focus on the emblems and the history. They're gonna be, they could do something that was particularly relevant. And when you look at this new demographic, I actually think, if you look at these new designs, I actually think this isn't bad. It's sleek. It's interesting. I really like the grill and the Jaguar application here. The monogram, again, while I may prefer this original look that we had, and I think obviously that tells a much more rich and interesting story. There's something to be played here where they are doing a streamlined approach that when paired with the right look and vehicle could be interesting. So I'm not discounting the potential of this rebrand just because that video is bad. That's truly what's bad. This may be a little bit more blander, but it's not horrible. And the essence of what a brand like this should be doing if they don't know how to look forward, because that campaign, they do not know how to look forward. This is literally operating in a parallel universe where I think they're gonna be able to sell a million units of electric vehicles, millions of units, because there's an anti Elon Musk crowd and Gen Z loves this particular look and feel. And they're gonna capture a new generation and embrace the brat zeitgeist and all the, I can just imagine the worst deck that you've ever seen. And then that is what was portrayed inside the video ad. But what they have at their fingertips is to running this exact same ad, capture a Jaguar, run all this, put cats out there, put these same shots, do it all in the same vintage style, run these car looks and feel backs, domesticated, not declawed, just run it, run the same ad looks and feels, run it on social media, make them all as video, just do it. And by running that selection of things, they could basically reown their core audience, make them reconsider it, tap into a youth that is actually significantly more nostalgic than any generation prior, yearning for a time before smartphones and before this crazy internet brain rot that we're in. And it is at their fingertips to execute. And any brand that has this history, this brand goes back to 1922, any brand with a 30, 50 year history, a hundred year history should be doing this. It is a winning strategy that is almost impossible to mess up if you do it with some intention. That's not what we saw. We saw a mediocre future. And I think the future, if you don't wanna go into the past, I can understand why many brands don't, because that traps you there for some period of time. And then you have to go to the future at some point. But you can't get caught in what I'm gonna call middle future, this idea that celebrating people of all looks and feels and bright colors and this changing nature of the world we're in is what people want, because that's not it. If you're gonna go into the future, I feel like you need to go into the far future. I'm pulling up in the Helly and Emil website, an example of far future here. In this universe section of their website where they basically can see every campaign and collaboration they've ever done. But this is a brand that very much lives in a future period, who's taking the idea of form of portrayal and made like a future universe that you can be a part of today. And I feel like brands that embody things like this, this brand does, Rick Owens does, the amorphous metal, this quasi cyber look. If you wanna paint a vision of the future, it needs to be an interesting and futuristic one. It needs to be technical. That is the future that people are really buying into, more post archive faction, more like what we're seeing with Helly and Emil. When you create vehicles and identities for the future that are more based around this, and I'm not saying it has to be black, silver and white, but it has to be thinking of a future that people view as interesting and aspirational, not as a future that seems like fun and collaborative and would appeal to Gen Z. So two very different things I think people should be considering as they go through exercise. Are we trapped in middle future or are we going deep future? And if you have nostalgia, you can just lean into that now. Anyway, December 2nd, we're going to find out what this actually looks like. Is the vehicle worth everything we saw for this campaign and can it surpass it? Or is this gonna be another amazing brand gradually slides down to nothing?