How Staying Relevant Will Help Your Brand To Thrive

The need for companies to be distinctive is of particular importance when they operate in a crowded marketplace, where many rivals will offer similar products. By creating a point of difference in brand identity, a firm may potentially appeal to a different segment of the market.

However, it is worth asking your branding agency just how far they should go in creating something distinctive. The reason is that if the difference in image, tone, product, or ethos, while standing out from the crowd, does not actually offer customers something that appeals to them, the rebranding exercise can be a waste of time.

A branding exercise that has raised exactly this sort of question is Jaguar’s new ‘Copy Nothing’ advert. If the idea is to portray Jaguar as a brand with a focus on doing things differently to its rivals, some might suggest this is a laudable aim; but was the content actually achieving this?

The 30-second ad sees a group of curiously-dressed men and women, wearing a range of pink, red, orange, or yellow dresses, stepping out of a yellow portal into a pink, rocky landscape, amid captions such as “create exuberant”, “live vivid” and “delete ordinary”.

Further scenes include one figure painting red stripes onto a wall, and a woman standing sideways in a blue room before wielding a large yellow mallet to the caption “break moulds”, before the group reassembles in the pink desert again under the “Copy Nothing” logo. In all of this, an ad for one of the world’s biggest names in car-making features no cars at all.

The internet and sections of the media went into meltdown, with some criticism attacking the ad for “wokery” amid the presence of some androgynous figures in the group, while others highlighted the lack of relevance in the absence of any Jaguar cars.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Jaguar boss Rawdon Glover accused critics of “vile hatred and intolerance” and insisted the ad was not about trying to be woke.

Highlighting the desire to emphasise a new market position as the brand prepares to launch three new electric cars in 20026, he stated: “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.”

Mr Glover added: “If we play in the same way that everybody else does we’ll just get drowned out.”

Although the Jaguar boss is insistent the approach is the right one, not everyone will be impressed with his argument. Ultimately, the key question will be whether this rebrand really does strike a chord with a new demographic, or whether it is seen as trying far too hard to be ‘different’.

When it comes to your own brand, it is worth noting that it does not start with the advantage of a company like Jaguar of being well-known already. Although this means a company like Jaguar can be stereotyped, it may, ironically, be the fact that everyone knows it makes cars which enables it to make a car-free ad.

A less well-known firm won’t have that luxury, so any rebrand you undertake must ensure its relevance by emphasising, whatever else your firm is about, what its core business is and why it offers what the potential customer needs or wants.

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