James Bond. Washington state. Corporate America. Boy scouts. Delta airlines. The Hasbro toy company. College campuses. Emojis. Pizza Hut, Nike, Lego, M&Ms. Bud Light.
This is a small selection of the things that Republicans and the rightwing commentariat has branded woke. And in the past couple of weeks, the car company Jaguar has found itself added to that list.
It began with a rebranding advertisement that was, admittedly, quite strange. A bunch of emotionless, oddly dressed people emerge from a yellow box set in a desolate pink desert, as a series of buzzy, and in some cases undecipherable (“live vivid”) messages flash up. The whole thing is set to a techno track, and at the end all the people walk off screen in reverse. There’s not a car in sight. It is objectively odd.
The reaction from the rightwing media to Jaguar, which has ended production of its vaunted gas-powered cars and will instead go all electric from 2026, was swift.
“They have more DEI than they have designers,” said the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld. Appearing to be genuinely annoyed by the 30-second ad, Gutfield claimed Jaguar had created an area of “woke stupidity”.
Tom Shillue, a Fox News substitute host, was of similar opinion.
“Another advertising fail”, he announced on air, referring to the ad as “infamously woke”. “Bud Light 2.0”, declared Jon Gabriel, a conservative columnist, referencing the controversy Budweiser faced after it showed tepid support for trans rights.
Nigel Farage, the British rightwing politician who looks a lot like a stereotypical Jaguar owner, said: “I predict Jaguar will now go bust. And you know what? They deserve to.”
But the talk of wokeness is overblown, said Roger Martin, an expert in marketing and branding who has worked with brands such as Procter & Gamble, Verizon and American Express, and is the former dean of the Rotman school of management at the University of Toronto.
“Anybody who’s a Jaguar enthusiast who wants to buy another Jaguar has known for a year or two that they’re going out of production of gas vehicles and are going to make EVs, and they’ve been waiting for 2026 and they see this ad, I think very few of them are going to be saying: ‘Oh that’s so woke.’”
That doesn’t mean Martin thinks the Jaguar campaign is a good idea.
“Generally people don’t realize the power of habit. The most valuable thing any company has is customers with a habit of buying from them,” Martin said.
He believes that the complete reimagining of Jaguar, which includes replacing the company’s long standing leaping cat logo, and an apparent appeal to a youthful audience, Jaguar could essentially be telling its current client base that the brand they know and love no longer exists.
“Lots of people have taken this kind of political, woke direction [in discussing Jaguar’s future] – that’s almost irrelevant to me,” he said. “What is relevant is they completely toasted their audience by forcing them to completely break every habit they had concerning Jaguar, and then had a pathetically weak, unappealing message for new people to come on board.”
Once, quite long ago, Jaguar was the epitome of cool. The Jaguar E-type, sold as the XK-E in the US, is one of the most iconic cars ever built, its gigantic hood jutting forward like a big nose, with a tiny capsule at the back for the driver to peer through. It was arguably the car of the 1960s, driven by the likes of George Best, Steve McQueen and Mick Jagger.
But Jaguar stopped selling the E-type in 1974, and over time gravitated towards large sedans, eventually becoming associated – fairly or not – with staid, pompous, parochial men. Even that audience has been declining, however. In the US, sales dropped from more than 31,000 in 2019 to 8,300 in 2023, and sales have also languished worldwide. Clearly, something had to change.
“Often, rebranding is a strategic imperative for brands when they are faced with declining sales or an ageing demographic, both of which are true of Jaguar,” said Vanitha Swaminathan, a professor of marketing at the University of Pittsburgh.
“They may be trying to appeal to younger audiences or even female consumers. Thus, their advertising represented a departure from their traditional, more classic look and feel.”
Swaminathan said the negative publicity would not be a “positive or negative” for Jaguar, and said there had been a positive reception in some quarters. Still, the rightwing naysayers have had the loudest voices, and Rawdon Glover, Jaguar’s managing director, has been bullish in the face of criticism.
“If we play in the same way that everybody else does, we’ll just get drowned out. So we shouldn’t turn up like an auto brand,” told the Financial Times.
“We need to re-establish our brand and at a completely different price point, so we need to act differently,” he said. “We wanted to move away from traditional automotive stereotypes.”
Rawdon also criticized the reaction to the company’s ad and subsequent launch of a bright pink concept car, describing some of the responses as “vile hatred” and “intolerance”.
The response has some echoes of the reaction to Bud Light’s ill-fated social media promotion with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer. Mulvaney faced transphobic abuse after she posted a personalized Bud Light can to her Instagram, and some of the beer’s blue-collar target market ditched their affiliation – sales of Bud Light fell by 25% after the promotion.
With Jaguar only releasing its next car in 2026, however, it will take time to find out what, if any, impact the strange advert and bright pink car will have on sales.
“Jaguar clearly signaled the beginning of its bold new era with provocative repositioning that addresses a new audience,” said Dory Ellis Garfinkle, chief marketing officer, at global branding firm Siegel+Gale.
“Ultimately the Jaguar product and experience will speak for itself in sales and the brand will not stand alone.”
It’s a long road ahead for the once esteemed car company. But if it can recapture even a bit of its 1960s heyday, then perhaps all the criticism, all the ridicule, will have been worth it.
