How Jaguar mistook visibility for public relevance, and lost its permission to operate
When Gerry McGovern, the chief creative officer at Jaguar Land Rover, was escorted out of their office on December 1, it marked more than the departure of a senior designer. It marked the collapse of a catastrophic misunderstanding about what makes a brand publicly relevant.
Jaguar thought they were achieving public relevance by riding the progressive zeitgeist. What they actually did was destroy their permission - or licence - to operate from the general public.
The "go woke, go broke" narrative dominating coverage is lazy cultural commentary masquerading as business analysis. The real story is the catastrophic misreading of a market that never existed.
For decades, Jaguar's core demographic was clear and profitable: affluent British traditionalists, aspirational executives aged 45-65, and automotive enthusiasts who valued heritage, craftsmanship, and understated luxury. These weren't the wealthiest buyers in absolute terms, but they were loyal, predictable, and numerous enough to sustain a premium marque.
Jaguar has traditionally been disproportionately popular in the UK, its home market, where brand familiarity and positive sentiment remained strong even as the company prepared for its radical transformation.
The sales figures tell a complex story: 49 vehicles registered in Europe in April 2025 versus 1,961 the previous year. A 97.5% collapse. But this wasn't purely consumer rejection in the traditional sense, because Jaguar had deliberately ceased all production of internal combustion engine vehicles in November 2024 to completely retool their production lines for electric vehicles only.
In other words: no sales because there were no cars to buy. The company created a self-imposed vacuum, betting everything that when the electric range launched, customers would materialise. The rebrand's public reception, however, suggested otherwise. YouGov data shows the dramatic impact: as the rebrand unfolded, sentiment shifted from "like" to "neutral" – a catastrophic movement for a premium brand that depends on aspiration and positive association.
The Type 00 concept – unveiled in bright pink and blue at Miami Art Week, not a motor show – was the visual manifestation of this rejection. Every design choice screamed: "This is not for you anymore."
McGovern didn't fail because Jaguar "went woke." He failed because someone convinced themselves there was a viable market for £100,000+ electric vehicles with no hybrid fallback, launched precisely as that market was collapsing. Porsche's Taycan sales plummeted 49% in 2024. Lotus slashed its delivery forecast from 26,000 to 12,000 vehicles. The £100,000+ EV market, as one analyst put it, "barely exists."
Yet Jaguar bet everything on it, creating what executives described as a "firewall" between their entire existing range and a purely electric future, ruling out even hybrid powertrains. Some might say this was a bold move, but it was delusional.
Capturing an Icon
How did a respected designer with genuine hits, the Defender, the modern Range Rover, the Evoque, produce something so catastrophically misjudged?
A leaked 2022 letter reveals the answer. Between 25 and 30 of McGovern's own design team protested the outsourcing of Jaguar's rebrand to Accenture Interactive, warning that external consultants were sidelining genuine automotive expertise for "brand strategy theatre."
The strategy promised Jaguar something seductive: cultural relevance among progressive demographics, social media visibility, and positioning as a "forward-thinking" luxury brand.
What Accenture brought wasn't design vision but transformation consultancy jargon: "disruptive positioning," "purpose-driven luxury," "radical authenticity." The kind of thinking that produces marketing campaigns featuring androgynous models and zero vehicles, because the actual product distracts from the brand "narrative."
McGovern, notoriously receptive to grand visions and resistant to criticism, bought the pitch completely. The result was the Panthera project – a rebrand so comprehensive it deleted Jaguar's 90-year heritage in favour of "sun-setting" the entire existing range.
What Public Relevance actually requires
Successful brand evolution maintains public permission while reaching for new audiences. Burberry achieved this by keeping its trench coat and check pattern as anchors while modernising. Porsche launched electric vehicles while continuing to sell petrol sports cars, letting customers decide.
Both brands understood a critical principle: your core demographic grants you permission to evolve, but only if you don't dismiss them as obsolete.
Jaguar did the opposite, rejecting automotive heritage as baggage. They didn't just pivot to new customers, they publicly repudiated their existing ones.
The result? Neither group bought cars. Or rather, neither group had the opportunity to buy cars – because Jaguar had stopped making them. The production cessation meant the rebrand's market failure couldn't be measured in real-time competitive losses, but the UK sentiment data told the story: Jaguar was actively converting positive associations into indifference.
What "zeitgeist" was Jaguar capturing? The answer is a category error between visibility and viability. Social media metrics and progressive policy positions dominate corporate discourse. But visibility isn't market demand.
The cohort willing to abandon automotive heritage, pay six figures for electric-only vehicles, and embrace radical design language in bright pink and blue is visible in brand presentations. It does not, however, show up in car dealerships in commercially viable numbers.
The £100,000+ EV buyer is not the same demographic as the sustainability-concerned consumer. Jaguar bet its future on a tiny Venn diagram intersection.
Learning the Wrong Lessons
The danger is that industries learn the wrong lessons. The "go woke, go broke" narrative – popularised by right-of-centre commentators – is satisfying but misleading for business strategy.
No amount of brand positioning substitutes for business fundamentals: understanding customers, respecting heritage as a strategic asset, maintaining product-market fit, and testing market appetite.
Burberry succeeded by balancing progressive positions with heritage respect. Porsche's electric strategy works because it still offers petrol alternatives.
The licence to operate is earned, not assumed
Brands don't have an inherent right to exist. They operate because relevant publics grant them permission – through purchases, word-of-mouth endorsement, and cultural acceptance.
Jaguar had that permission, but then they were convinced that traditional customers were holding them back; that their heritage was baggage; that the "future" was a demographic that existed in presentations but not showrooms; and that being "bold" meant rejecting everything that made them publicly relevant in the first place. The 97.5% sales collapse is what happens when you confuse visibility with market-validated relevance.
The manner of McGovern's departure – escorted from the office after 21 years – is the corporate equivalent of a public execution. It signals the previous strategy is dead.
McGovern, for all his misjudgements, produced genuine design successes. He won an OBE and Autocar's Sturmey Award, but when you lose your license to operate, it doesn't matter how much attention you generate. Jaguar learned this the hardest way possible: by discovering that the customers they dismissed as irrelevant were, in fact, the only ones who mattered.
The brand that promised to "copy nothing" ended up learning what every failed transformation teaches: that public relevance cannot be decreed or manifested through bold branding. It must be earned from the people who actually determine whether you deserve to exist.
Jaguar thought they were capturing the zeitgeist, but they were actually destroying their permission to operate. That's a catastrophic strategic failure dressed up in the language of transformation.
Public relevance isn't about capturing attention, it's about earning trust. Jaguar forgot that and it cost them everything.
The question now is whether Jaguar can rebuild the public permission it so casually destroyed, and that will require more than admitting the strategy failed. It will require understanding why: because they optimised for visibility among people who would never buy their cars and alienated the people who would have.
Gerry McGovern thought so far outside the box that he couldn't find his way back. His departure is the inevitable result of forgetting that boxes exist for a reason: they contain the things that actually matter.
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