The Jaguar Land Rover managing director is defending the British luxury car company after its recent rebranding spurred backlash on social media.
Jaguar debuted its new logo and slogan, “Copy Nothing,” in a promotional video last week.
The ad featured androgynous models in brightly colored, over-the-top outfits, including one man wearing a dress, along with other slogans such as “create exuberant,” “live vivid,” “delete ordinary” and “break moulds.” Notably, the ad did not feature any cars in its 30-second run.
The video blew up on social media, attracting over 163 million views and over 100,000 comments.
Critics accused Jaguar of abandoning its legacy as a high-performance sports car manufacturer with the marketing campaign and claimed the brand had gone “woke.”
In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Jaguar Land Rover managing director Rawdon Glover defended the brand relaunch and denied the ad was meant to send a “woke” message.
While Glover praised the attention around the campaign as “very positive,” he said he was disappointed by the “level of vile hatred and intolerance” shown by social media commentators towards the models in the video.
He claimed the ad’s message had been lost “in a blaze of intolerance.”
“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,” Glover told the FT.
“We need to re-establish our brand and at a completely different price point so we need to act differently. We wanted to move away from traditional automotive stereotypes.”
The Jaguar rebrand is part of the company’s efforts to attract wealthier customers in its transition to an all-electric vehicle lineup.
“This is not a depiction of how we think our future customers are,” Glover told the FT. “We don’t want to necessarily leave all of our customers behind. But we do need to attract a new customer base.”
Jaguar previously defended the company’s brand relaunch in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“Our brand relaunch for Jaguar is a bold and imaginative reinvention and as expected it has attracted attention and debate. As proud custodians at such a remarkable point in Jaguar’s history we have preserved iconic symbols while taking a dramatic leap forward. The brand reveal is only the first step in this exciting new era and we look forward to sharing more on Jaguar’s transformation in the coming days and weeks,” the statement said.
