Doug Nye: Is Jaguar’s re-brand an elaborate ploy?

There are many things about the motoring world that I will never, ever, understand. My distaste for most such matters stems from simple disinterest. If it’s a road or production car – unless there’s a racing aspect to its story – then, for me, it could hardly be more dull. In stark contrast, show me A Racer of any era, and I’m always instantly hooked. It’s called, I believe – never having grown up.

Therefore enthusiasm for any one make or brand in particular – like one-make club faith – feels inexplicable. But I will admit that of all the motoring world’s brands and manufacturers, I have always had quite a soft spot for Jaguar.

Company founder Sir William Lyons could evidently be an autocratic and demanding old Victorian mill-owner. But for much of his career he proved shrewd, extremely wise – and absolutely not least, truly endowed with remarkable styling taste.

It’s now 80 years since he made the ‘no-brainer’ decision, in 1945, to rename his marque Jaguar Cars, instead of SS – which title at the time had horribly different connotations. What later proved not so bright was his announcement 60 years ago, in July 1965,  that his Jaguar Group was to merge with the British Motor Corporation to create British Motor Holdings Ltd. And when government pressure (don’t you just love those politicians?) drove BMH to merge with Leyland Motor Corporation, that marriage from hell spawned the fatally flawed British Leyland behemoth with all its myriad problems.

“There’s the thought that this could be some covert master-plan to fool us all”

Sir William, who at 64 years old in ’65, had been immensely troubled by his own advancing age, his lack of an heir – son John having been killed in a road accident en route to Le Mans ’55 – and the possibility of BMH threatening Jaguar body supply, had (arguably) made a terrible error. BL was a disaster, and in 1975 – 50 years ago – the crumbling construct was effectively nationalised.

Come 1984, however, Jaguar Cars was re-privatised, profitably enough for Ford to buy it in 1990. That marriage then faltered until in 2008 Ford sold the company to the Indian Tata Group who then created Jaguar Land Rover (JLR).

So here we had a legendary and widely respected British marque, which had fairly miraculously bounced back from its British Leyland years of near-obsolescent design and memorably shoddy quality. The downside more recently has been that Jaguar creaked into the Covid era with real profit remaining elusive. So, Sir William’s 1965 apparent self-confidence collapse resulted in decades of turmoil for ‘The Cat’.

Now, the inexact ‘science’ of marketing has historically been a British industry blind spot. In 2000, the instant we left the Boeing 747 at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport for the city’s Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix, we were confronted in the terminal corridors by a Jaguar marketing crime.

Immense ads on every wall bawled ‘The Cat is Back!’ – Jaguar Racing, ex-Stewart Grand Prix, was making its F1 debut that weekend.  But despite the briefest flirt with a Grand Prix notion for 1954, one of Sir William Lyons’s most shrewd decisions had been to concentrate upon sports car racing – the prestigious  Le Mans 24 Hours race particularly. For his sporting-minded road car clientele, success there really drove home a profitable message.  Grand Prix – F1 – was just too remote from his company’s customer base (and too costly) to consider.  So ‘The Cat’ was in no way ‘back’ at Grand Prix level. It had never even been there in the first place. Marketeers…

This past November has now just seen the latest breed of ‘marketeers’ re-brand poor Jaguar for an all-electric future. Can serious players still remain convinced that electric cars are ‘the future’? And as if its queerly-provocative re-brand doesn’t go far enough in destroying Jaguar’s remaining respect and reputation, almost immediate promotion of a ‘styling exercise’ which has all the aesthetic attraction of a club-footed slurry barge sparks the thought that surely this could be some covert master-plan to fool us all?

Have in fact their finance wallahs given those marketeers the rope to hang themselves in an apparent plot presaged back in 1967 by Mel Brooks’s now cult movie The Producers?

Movie buffs will recall the story, which stars Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. A theatre producer and his accountant create a stage musical they can sell to gullible investors, while really intending it to fail. They find a play script Springtime for Hitler ostensibly celebrating nostalgic Nazidom. It’s got to fail, right? Drop-jawed audiences huff and puff in initial outrage. But hey, righteous outrage turns to immense success as it’s all perceived as being really a simply magnificent satire. The producers’ plan to con a fortune from investors by claiming their musical’s flop has swallowed the money instead; they have been foiled.

Well for Tata’s and JLR’s sake I trust their Jaguar re-launch proves to have been an elaborate – perhaps in some convoluted way tax-saving? – ploy. Because if it isn’t then the road to dusty death should justifiably lay ahead. As for poor Sir William’s sense of  the aesthetic – so supremely expressed by the work of Malcolm Sayer – both of these British motor industry greats must metaphorically be way into the red on their mechanical Smiths rev-counters. The once mighty is surely just being demeaned by modern management.