The Jaguar Rebrand and the Difference Between Attention and Approval

In November 2024 Jaguar revealed a new identity ahead of its shift to an all-electric line-up: a new wordmark set in a distinctive mixed-case style, a revised monogram, and a launch film with no cars in it at all. The online response was overwhelmingly negative and extremely loud.

The question people skipped

Almost all of the criticism assumed the audience was existing Jaguar owners and enthusiasts. If that were true, the work failed badly. But the whole premise of the repositioning was that this audience was not large enough to sustain the business — Jaguar's sales had fallen a long way from their peak, and the company had announced it was moving to a much smaller number of considerably more expensive electric vehicles.

That is a different customer. Someone spending six figures on an electric grand tourer in 2026 is being courted by brands that did not exist twenty years ago and are not carrying decades of associations. Jaguar's problem was not that people had forgotten it. It was that they remembered it too specifically.

Where the criticism has weight

Two objections hold up regardless of audience:

The launch showed no product. Deliberately, and it generated attention — but attention is not the same as demand, and a car company that shows no car invites the reading that there is nothing to show yet.

The leaper was de-emphasised. The leaping cat is a genuine distinctive asset, in the Tropicana sense: recognised globally, independent of the name, and impossible to buy again. Any identity that reduces its role is spending equity, and needs to be very sure what it is buying.

What smaller businesses should take from it

You will not have Jaguar's problem. You will have the inverse of it: not enough recognition rather than the wrong kind. But the underlying question transfers exactly, and it is the first question we ask on any brief.

Who is this for — the customers you have, or the customers you want? Those two answers produce different logos, and a brand that tries to serve both usually lands somewhere that excites neither. Deciding it consciously is the whole job. Deciding it by accident is how you end up redesigning again in two years.

It is also why our brief starts with competitors and target audience rather than colour preferences — see how a project runs.