If you have any basic knowledge of British car marques, when you think of Jaguar cars you might probably think of the Jaguar E-Type or if you are more knowledgeable about British cars you might also think of some other models. An image of the mighty Mark Ten Jag with its twin fuel tanks might pop into your mind or even one of the XJ or XK models or the late 1940’s Mk IV nicknamed the ‘Wardour Street Bentley’ on account of it being luxurious but not, unlike a Bentley, out of the price range of the slightly sleazy forties and fifties business types of Soho’s Wardour Street.

Jaguar is a car marque with a massive depth and breadth of heritage and although I’d rather have a Mk Ten than a new F-Pace if I was in the position to choose to buy a Jag, I know that this heritage could be an advertisers dream. It could be a highly effective tool to sell Jaguars. It’s a heritage that the Chinese auto makers don’t have and the less said about bits of the history of some German vehicle manufacturers such as Daimler-Benz, BMW and Volkswagen, the better.

Although modern Jaguars have a similar jelly mould shape as many other modern cars and it’s difficult to pick out a modern Jag in a car park so indistinctive are they now, Jaguar were in a good position to talk about their new car’s comfort or trim or technology. Unfortunately in a recent advertising campaign Jaguar didn’t do that. Instead they gave us a short video that seems to have been put together by Jaguar’s human resources and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) teams.

The advertisement is an utter and complete mess. It’s just a confused mish mash of various diversity tick box actors goofing around which says nothing about the car itself. When I saw it I thought that Jaguar had taken some infantile and pretentious perfume advert and shoved the Jaguar name on it.

Here’s the advert in question:

When I saw this advert I could not help but think of the Bud Light fiasco when a beer maker whose primary market is young working class men and women chose an annoying transvestite to front up one of their advertising campaigns. This campaign was a disaster for Bud Light and its parent company. Potential customers of Bud Light beer were so affronted by these adverts and the tranny’s claim that he really was a girl, that it stimulated a consumer boycott of Bud Light beer which was so effective that I don’t think that the Bud Light brand has yet to properly recover.

When the Jaguar marketing team started to get criticism from the general public about the new advert the people in charge of Jaguar’s X (formerly Twitter) account decided to double down on alienating their potential customers. When one person said ‘what’s this all about’ Jaguar marketing arrogantly said ‘the future’. The problem for Jaguar cars is this sort of advertising is not the future, it’s the past. Many companies have decided to advertise their products in the manner that Jaguar are and they’ve come unstuck, they’ve faffed around and been found out and these companies have found to their cost that when they ‘get woke’ like this then they go broke.

Unless you are insanely wealthy you do not go and buy a Jaguar on a whim. They are expensive cars and the purchase of one is going to be carefully weighed up by the potential buyer. The marketing of the cars should have taken account of the fact that people are likely to be more influenced by what the car can do and its comfort levels for example than an advert that obviously is trying so hard to be ‘zany’ that the advert looks cringey.

The Bud Light fiasco should have been a warning to companies like Jaguar to not have advertising campaigns that engage in tick box talent hiring or out of place and infantile looking design. The problem for Jaguar is that they’ve not taken the Bud Light story as a cautionary tale but instead as a guidebook. Jaguar have really shot themselves in the foot with this campaign especially now when politics and society in both the USA and Europe is turning away from the sort of culture that sees this type of advertising style as good. Jaguar have not so much produced an advertising campaign but a DEI themed suicide note.