November 22, 2024

AND THEN HE CRACKED OPEN A TALL FROSTY BOTTLE OF BUD LIGHT: Jaguar boss says criticism of rebrand is ‘vile hatred and intolerance.’

The boss of Jaguar has defended the carmaker’s controversial rebrand and described criticism of its marketing campaign as “vile hatred and intolerance”.

Rawdon Glover, the managing director of Jaguar, said the campaign message had been lost in “a blaze of intolerance”, adding that the carmaker must move away from “traditional automotive stereotypes”.

It comes after Jaguar ditched its historic “growler” cat logo and released an advert featuring models with asymmetrical haircuts and dressed in brightly-coloured clothing. It also includes the phrases “break moulds” and “create exuberant”.

Mr Glover told the Financial Times: “We need to re-establish our brand and at a completely different price point so we need to act differently.

“If we play in the same way that everybody else does, we’ll just get drowned out. So we shouldn’t turn up like an auto brand.”

Jim Geraghty writes: Jaguar Bud Lights Itself.

I don’t want to speak for all straight males — or even all late-40s, 6’2″, straight white males — but nothing in this commercial — avant-garde fashion, the sullen expressions on the vaguely androgynous faces, the declaration that without their product my life isn’t exuberant, vivid, or extraordinary enough — appeals to me or makes me want to buy that brand of car. And remember, Jaguars are luxury cars that start at around $50,000 for the bare-bones models but go well into the high five-figures and into the six-figures. If I’m going to plunk down a small fortune on a luxury car, it had better be off-the-charts awesome in both its performance and its image. A high-end Jaguar F-Type can run $115,000. For that kind of money, I want the Batmobile.

In a recent interview, secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth says of the Pentagon, “On the recruiting side, what you’ve done is you Bud Lighted yourself.”

To a conservative, the phrase “they Bud Lighted themselves” is abundantly clear. They let their image be remade by a far-left individuals who didn’t understand the institution’s original purpose, mission, or appeal, and found themselves alienating a vast swath of their previous supporters, with little or no offsetting appeal to the very small demographic that the new image is supposed to win over.

* * * * * * * *

I passed a Jaguar dealership here in Palm Beach — think the guys selling the cars there are loving this new rebrand and new commercial?

The online left has no idea how small it is, demographically, in a country of 337 million people and roughly 154 million voters. It is likely that both online and offline, they spend time around like-minded people — perhaps extremely like-minded people — and have no idea how they come across to people who don’t already agree with them. And then, when confronted with disagreement, their first instinct is to get the disagreeing person removed in some way: reported to HR, fired, or banned from a platform. And if that fails . . . they leave X and flee to Bluesky.

And then declare the vast majority of the public, who predictably loathed Jag’s weird new ad as spewing “vile hatred and intolerance.”

I’m not sure how that sells cars, but then, Jag isn’t in the car business anymore. It’s in the DEI business. On Wednesday, Steve wrote, “The genderfluid DEI people got control of another brand via the marketing department and the rest seems inevitable.”

As Robert Conquest Third Law of Politics states, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll