How I “Rebranded” Jaguar’s Rebrand…Using Blender 3D

OK, I think I’ve had enough time to truly reflect on the Jaguar rebrand, but just in case you have been living under a rock, this is what it looks like. No, it’s not a clothing brand ad and, yes, it’s had a lot of negative feedback…for good reason…but we’ll get into that in a bit.

This whole drama has been a lesson in what NOT to do when rebranding a car company with 100 years of legacy steeped in British tradition. It’s even prompted me to have a crack at a Jaguar ad myself, in an effort to “rebrand” the rebrand…to prove a point, I guess. But, before we dive into MY version of the rebrand, we need to do what the Jaguar marketing team failed to…and that’s understanding their current audience, so let’s consider this…

The cardinal rule of marketing is to put your own thoughts and opinions to one side and put yourself in the shoes of the end user. You need to understand the audience. You need empathy. If you try to promote a brand with your own agenda, you will ultimately fail…and this is what the bods at Jaguar have done.

They actually got this right for a while, leaning into the “it’s good to be bad” mantra and understood that they could be seen as the underdog. The anti-hero. The cool bad guy with the British accent. This could have been a fantastic evolution of the brand, but unfortunately didn’t seem to be enough and was a short lived campaign.

Since starting this video, they actually released the concept of their next model, the type 00…which, well I don’t know…It’s PINK? Okay…soooo this car is designed for the younger audience? It certainly looks like it was designed BY the younger audience. Do younger people have the money to buy a Jaguar anyway??

Then we get into the issue that Jaguar weren’t making any profit from their car sales. This isn’t a marketing problem though. It’s an operational problem. The brand of Jaguar was well established and didn’t need to be messed with. It’s what distinguished itself apart from Audi, BMW and Mercedes, but if they couldn’t keep up with the competition then it’s time to look at your fleet of cars and supply chain.

Well, like I said, I decided to have a crack myself, taking into consideration the move to electric vehicles and creating my own teaser ad for Jaguar in this self-applied mock up brief…because I’m stubborn and sad. Here we go…

It’s crazy to think this was all free using Blender 3D. Choosing a car model from Blenderkit, which sort of looks like an EV (and in some ways better than the actual Jaguar concept car, but that’s subjective) I decided to go down the route of showing the car, without showing it. As I’ve mentioned, a lot of people buy a Jaguar because it’s a Jaguar. The great thing about cars is that you can use their lines and profile to show just enough without giving too much away. As it’s an EV, it would be appropriate to follow this sort of aesthetic, taking a kind of… TRON approach…I guess (I like that movie)…shaping curves to map around the car’s model and using them as paths for the light objects to travel along.

I decided to just animate the elements of these paths which would convey a sense of movement, while leaving other elements like the windscreen and headlights static, giving a sense of structure and form.

To get the emission objects to move in unison and exactly at the same pace, I used graphs to define precisely where they should start and stop. With a bit of volumetrics and additional lighting, I decided to give it a bit more…”electricity”, creating a thunder storm as a backdrop. As it’s a Jaguar, we want a foreboding and powerful aura that conveys the car as something elemental, rather than artificial. With some particle effects to convey a bit more speed and some fancy camera angles, we’re ready to render.

All that’s left is to choose some dramatic music create a snappy tagline and slap on the logo…but not the new one. I decided to go for the logo and optima font from 1982 to 2012, which kind of felt like a renaissance era for Jaguar, with the XK and XF in production during this period. All this harks back to that legacy and, in some way nostalgia, Jaguar owners want to see, while combining the old with the new, marking an evolutionary phase for the brand and respecting it’s history.

Anyway, that’s my scratch itched, showing that you could create a car advert, completely free using Blender 3D and highlighting everything that’s wrong with the current Jaguar rebrand. Let me know what you guys think. Maybe you LIKE the new Jaguar brand? It’s certainly been a great case study on how to rebrand…or maybe how NOT to rebrand.