By John Fund
Tuesday, November 26, 2024
An advertising campaign by Bud Light featuring
transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney blew up in the company’s face last year. The “woke”
marketing led to a collapse of the brand — it cost the company nearly $400
million in sales and dropped it from No. 1 to No. 3 in the U.S. beer market.
At least the CEO of Anheuser-Busch issued a quasi-apology. “We never intended to be part of a
discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people
together over a beer,” Brendan Whitworth wrote on the company’s X account.
Faced with a similar avalanche of criticism and ridicule this month for its new
ad campaign, Jaguar is taking a different approach. It’s digging in.
Managing director Rawdon Glover has lamented to the Financial
Times that the company’s bizarre ad campaign — which features actors in vibrant
clothing striking nonsensical poses — is being drowned out in “a blaze of
intolerance” on social media. He even claims that the ad wasn’t meant to be
“woke.”
Noting that the ad never even shows a car, Tesla founder
Elon Musk responded to the ad on X, asking, “Do you sell cars?”
Glover says the ad has been misunderstood. “We wanted to move away
from traditional automotive stereotypes.” (Such as showing the product?) But he
is disappointed in “the level of vile hatred and intolerance” directed at the
ad. He insists that he’s gotten “very positive” reactions from many quarters,
which he won’t identify. But they are clearly outnumbered by the skeptics. A
senior advertising executive who has worked on Jaguar’s account told the Financial
Times: “You can destroy a brand in 30 seconds that took a lifetime to
build. Strong brands reinvent themselves but always remain true to the core of
their DNA. For luxury brands in particular, authenticity is key and this fails
the test.”
Jaguar has had an iconic presence in popular culture as
the quintessential British sports car. The Jaguar C-X75 used in the James Bond
movie Spectre sold at auction for $1.3 million a few years ago. Its
commercials used to elevate rather than obscure the product, and they sometimes
stirred the soul, as did this 1999 ad featuring music by Etta James.
But Jaguar now seems to have been captured by “woke”
executives who are taking lessons from Bud Light. Consider the “transformative
journey” that Santino Pietrosanti, Jaguar’s head of brand strategy, described
at an awards ceremony last month. He told the audience that Jaguar was
“committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive, and unified culture that is
representative not only of the people who use our products but of the society
in which we all live.” It’s worth noting that a video of him making those remarks
has been scrubbed from X.
Jaguar may be stuck with its “woke” future. Its new car
lineup will be all-electric and feature three models, the first of which won’t
even go on sale until 2026. The new cars may cost twice as much as the ones
Jaguar was until recently selling. The company insists that its new cars will
be built on a foundation of “exuberant modernism.” It promises to debut a
prototype at Miami Art Week next week.
Am I the only one who wonders if Jaguar’s new line of
cars will ever roll off the assembly line?
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