Marketing leads design, a story of Jaguar’s rebranding

In case you missed it, Jaguar has been making some waves in the design and automotive world this week with its total rebranding and new concept car. If you go over to their social media, any trace of “old Jaguar” is totally gone. It’s glitzy, glamorous, fashion, darling.

So what? Why is everyone up in arms about what Jaguar is doing and how they are doing it?

Objectively speaking, Jaguar either played this quite well (likely) or stumbled into a genius bit of marketing and creativity by accident (doubtful) that achieved exactly what they wanted: the previous generation of Jaguar owners got up in arms about the rebrand, the design, the everything about the change, which in turn pushed Jaguar’s rebranding announcement to top of everyone’s online feeds. A new generation of potential customers suddenly became aware of the brand, with zero context for the old design language, heritage, or other baggage.

Jaguar’s launch here is a masterclass in marketing, which created impossibly high expectations for unveiling the concept car that would embody all this branding. Sadly, the design may have missed the mark for most automotive enthusiasts.

Look, design is subjective; just look at all the folks out there who bought a cybertruck. I’m not saying they have bad taste, but the sales numbers for that vehicle speak for themselves. As a side note, some of the reason the new jaguar concept vehicle looks the way it does can be attributed to the hype built up around the cybertruck, and its total disregard for acknowledged principles of automotive design.

The concept car unveiled by Jaguar looks like marketing came first, and design came second. Whether we like it or not, that is a winning strategy. Influencer marketing is a powerful tool, leveraging parasocial relationships to prop a product up as worthy of spending your money on, regardless of efficacy and quality.

What does this mean for product development, and design? Well, it means that consumers have evolved and the marketing department is now the proxy for buyer feedback. Marketing may now have such a deep understanding of how to drive traffic, attention, and eyeballs towards design that it now becomes the de facto decision maker in revisions and ideation.

In many pockets of industry, this isn’t a new approach to New Product Introductions (NPI). It is, however, a shift in luxury goods and higher-tier product offerings.

There’s an argument to be made here that Jaguar is absolutely nailing it, with a design language unlike anything else, driven by a strong rebranding strategy and marketing campaign that fit a concept vehicle to its mold. We’re talking about it, you’re talking about it, and most importantly, our engagement had resulted in Jaguar getting what they wanted: a new generation of potential customers suddenly aware that they exist.

It will be interesting to see how Jaguar parlays the hype and activity into a product launch in 2025.

The typical life cycle of Automotive production has been upended. Instead of debuting a concept car at a trade show (or via intentional ‘leaks’) and building the associated marketing ephemera to support it, we now have a bold rebranding and a concept car that isn’t likely to change much, if at all between now and production.

If Gyroscope is about anything, it is purposeful disruption. It is foolish to assume that anything Jaguar has done to date has been a flight of fancy or without a plan. Who knows if the last few weeks have exceeded expectations or accelerated other releases?

We applaud their efforts, polarizing as they may be, as they are consistent with a brand whose origins were about disruption in the automotive industry. If self-disruption is something you are interested in and you want to work with someone who shares your values, give us a call.