Jaguar’s Ad Drives Customers Away
The company is retooling and deliberately working to shed its former customer base: straight men with money.
Jaguar isn’t Bud Light, but the formerly top-selling brewer’s collapse after an obnoxious woke ad certainly comes to mind in light of the British automaker’s marketing self-immolation.
Bud Light was the cheap beer of the everyman. The ordinary Americans who made it the sales leader sure weren’t going to stand for having “transgender” poster boy Dylan Mulvaney serving as a spokesman. Almost overnight, the beer giant’s sales cratered, and it became a new byword in the marketing world.
Jaguar’s “copy nothing” ad seems to have, well, copied Bud Light’s template.
Copy nothing. #Jaguar pic.twitter.com/BfVhc3l09B
— Jaguar (@Jaguar) November 19, 2024
I’ve watched the ad several times and still don’t know what I saw. Based on the comments from X users, I’m not alone. Jaguar — excuse me, JaGUar, as it’s now stylized — used eight multiracial people of ambiguous genders dressed in brightly colored and ostentatious outfits for the ad. There’s a rock and a sledgehammer, but there’s not a car anywhere in sight.
“Do you sell cars?” asked Tesla owner Elon Musk in a typical reply.
Come to think of it, not showing any cars is kind of fitting, given how poorly Jaguar is already selling these days. Globally, Jaguar sold just over 64,000 cars in 2023, and it has paused production for as much as a year. According to Car and Driver, “Jaguar will depart the mass-market premium field entirely in favor of a three-model lineup of EVs gone significantly upmarket.” The plan is to sell 50,000 cars at premium prices.
The ritzy British car brand certainly isn’t in the same league as Bud Light in terms of mass appeal, but its target audience used to be men with money. Now, the message is DiVErsiTy.
Newsweek reports, “Speaking in October at the Attitude Awards, a celebration of LGBTQ+ icons for which Jaguar is a sponsor, Jaguar’s head of brand strategy Santini Pietrosanti shone a light on Jaguar’s recent push towards inclusivity and adoption of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.”
At a time when many companies are ditching racist and sexist DEI, that’s a stubbornly ideological move. It’s also puzzling. I’m not sure there are 50,000 gender-confused people with degrees in modern art or 17th-century lesbian poetry who have the money for an outrageously priced Jaguar EV. We’re told they’re so hard up for cash that Joe Biden had to send the bill for their student loans to taxpayers.
The Jaguar campaign is notable for its almost open contempt for its customer base. Whereas Bud Light was arguably trying to expand its audience — miserable failure notwithstanding — Jaguar is actively trying to shed prior buyers. According to one Jaguar official in July, “We assume that 10 to 15 percent of our current Jaguar customers will follow us.”
Why set your sights so low? A few more ads like this one, and you could achieve the Left’s favorite number: 1%.
I want to end on an upbeat note, though, so I’ll say again that the trend among big companies is actually away from woke DEI stuff. It’s a long way from dead, but there are still pro-family, pro-life car ads — with actual cars in them — being run by companies like Volvo.
