The internet loves a pile-on, and – unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere -you would have struggled to avoid the recent coverage of the rebranding of Jaguar.
If Jaguar’s marketing team subscribes to the theory that ‘all publicity is good publicity’ (a pretty flawed theory imho) then their hands must be blistered from all the high-fives they would be giving themselves – because this news went nuclear.
At the heart of the change, Jaguar have decided to switch to making electric only vehicles from 2026. To support this EV future, they decided to ditch their entire brand heritage and reposition themselves as “exuberant”, “modernist”, “compelling”, and all about “fearless creativity”. Out go many of the original brand codes, to be replaced by two logos, a typeface, a graphic code called ‘strikethrough’ and a colour palette consisting of red, blue and yellow.
Gone is any reference – visual or otherwise – to their history as a carmaker known for iconic designs, sophisticated luxury and engineering excellence.
The company who gave the world the E type Jaguar – which Enzo Ferrari once called the ‘most beautiful car in the world’ – now looks like manufacturer of household appliances.
Now as sacrilegious as this may seem to hardcore petrolheads or people with a plentiful supply of rose-tinted spectacles, it’s still something most people normally wouldn’t give a second thought to.
So why did it blow up?
In truth, there’s no single reason.
Branding experts were no doubt puzzled and horrified as to why a luxury brand would walk away from the one thing that was unique, and which had taken almost a century to build – its brand heritage. Some would have lamented the death of another iconic British car-brand. Many were just piling on because in the age of social media it’s easy to have an opinion, no matter how baseless, and journalists can build an entire story around 2 random tweets and a tik-tok.
Of course, lost in all of this is the state of the underlying business.
Jaguar as a commercial enterprise has been struggling for some time now. Their sales have been on a downward trajectory for years, hampered by an uninspiring line-up of cars and a reputation for unreliability.
The path they have been on would have ultimately seen the death of the Jaguar brand anyway, as people simply weren’t buying their cars.
And that’s the real point about brands. Your brand is not what you say it is, it’s about what your customers say it is.
And customer perceptions of your brand ultimately aren’t shaped by your logo or your typeface, they are shaped by the actual product and the experience associated with it.
In the cutthroat of world of luxury cars, the stakes are high, and buyers are demanding. Calling road service on a regular basis is not an experience they are seeking.
Don’t get me wrong, as rebrands go this one is a shocker, up there (or rather down there) with PWC’s short-lived rebrand of its consultancy business to ‘Monday’. I’m not sure that one even lasted a week.
But my point is that brands are ultimately shaped more by their actions their words. Logos and typefaces are important, but while they can lift a good business, they can’t save a bad one.
Advisers define the Ensombl brand
The meaning of the Ensombl brand is defined not by us but by our users – the 9,300 or so advice professionals who use the Ensombl platform to collaborate with their peers to solve their day-to-day challenges. Those challenges include everything from setting their fees to recruiting the right talent. From formalising an investment philosophy to choosing the right technology. From creating an APL to refining their client experience.
The brand they value the most is that of the advice profession itself – the insights and wisdom and lived experiences of their peers mean more to them than any corporate pronouncements.
These insights and experiences are infused into the content we build with our corporate partners, meaning it is effectively co-created with advisers, for advisers.
The dividend for that co-creation is a 45% uplift in responsiveness when compared to standard corporate content. That’s the dividend from advisers showing their respect to brands who invest in them. And if marketing ROI is important, then that’s a number that’s hard to ignore.
If you have a solution to an adviser problem, and you want to harness the power of advisers to communicate at scale, then reach out. We’ve got plenty of case studies – involving brands and businesses of all shapes and sizes – to share with you.
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