Two important and related events have happened in the latter part of 2024 – the Jaguar rebrand and the merger of Omnicom and Interpublic to form the world’s largest ad agency group. They are both signifiers of the way branding is faltering.
Ad agencies traditionally create advertising – it’s in the name. Their job was to raise salience and appeal of the products their clients wanted to sell. Along the way they often dominated the control of branding and identity. A bold and distinctive logo on a TV ad would instantly be recognised in-store and another sale would be made. Then it all got complicated. Social media proliferated advertising and now AI is automating it, severely denting the traditional role of ad agencies with much now being brought in-house. Hence the need to regroup and consolidate. But this focus on creating the 30 second ad can put too much emphasis on the here and now, not what has come before, or will come in the future. It’s a transient occupation and all the more so for the rapid pace of social media.
In this complexity, consumers are hitting information overload. For example, it’s no longer good enough to show your new car model zooming along some impossibly free-flowing urban landscape. You have to do something shocking – like throwing your brand out of the window and starting again like Jaguar have just done. Yet destroying their brand is the only shocking thing they have actually done, because their new concept car is silly (why have an enormously long bonnet if you don’t have enormously long engine to put under it), their logo is no longer? unique (and remarkably similar to Lexus) and their ad could be selling absolutely anything. It’s all a lot of noise to get attention – and it worked – a bit like setting fire to your hair in a public park. I bet the ad agency had a ball putting that one together. In the race to generate more and more noise they have forgotten what the other half of branding is all about – appeal.
Here, I must fess up- I owned a knackered old Mk2 Jag in my youth so whilst I’ve never owned a pair of string-backed gloves, I love the nostalgia of the old William Lyons Jaguars. They were stylish beyond belief – Enzo Ferrari said the E-Type was the most beautiful car in the world. Jeremy Clarkson would have you believe that all Jaaaag drivers were either cads or villains, but there is something uniquely British, brutish and masculine about the brand. Not anymore.
Jaguar is declining, something had to be done to connect to a new audience, but why didn’t they find a way to connect with the assets and values they uniquely own and re-interpret them in a way that resonates with drivers today. Fashion brands Chanel and Prada are older than Jaguar, yet they manage to keep right on the button of consumer trends with each season’s collection, time and time again. Yet they are built on the bedrock of their heritage. It defines who they are and guides them into the future.
As the job to connect to our consumers becomes increasingly complicated the thread that joins all those interactions together becomes increasingly important. We need constants like heritage, often uniquely embodied in a brand identity, to navigate and align with brands. Heritage is not a burden that drags you backwards, it is an asset that, used correctly by branding agencies not advertising agencies, can be used to build a future.
Jeremy Clarkson says he is no more interested in an electric car than he would be in a new fridge. I tend to agree. I’m not excited about driving in the future – the funs gone out of it. I left the world of product design to learn about branding exactly because the white goods and electronics companies I designed for did a very bad job of branding (except for Apple). I always thought car companies knew how to connect emotionally, but as they move into an electronic world, they seem to have lost their way and fallen in line with the fridge makers. Jaguar, of all car brands, could have injected the future with a bit of joie de vivre, instead we just get yet more digital interference.
