Could be worse i believe they stared out as Swallow Sidecars from Blackpool

Whoever came up with that advert is going to get a massive bonus.  The whole world is talking about Jaguar, even Model Engineers!

Unlike the car ad I just watched on TV.  Conventionally shiny, slick and utterly unmemorable.   Seen only ten minutes ago and I don’t remember who the maker was.   Meanwhile Jaguar have gone viral, for free…

🙂

Dave

They say there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Benetton tried a similar strategy in the 1980s …. https://www.brandvertising.ch/2024/05/united-colors-of-benetton/  …it turned out to be quite successful. But I think those ads were very carefully aimed at their target market segment.

Jaguar is currently owned by Tata Motors of India, who have recently been trying a number of different strategies to improve sales… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_Cars

“In 2023, JLR announced plans to move Jaguar further upmarket, following years of zero-profitability and poor sales. The holding company detailed its plans to downsize Jaguar into a lower volume brand, competing closer to the likes of Bentley and Porsche.[55][56][57]

In June 2024, the company stopped production of every model except for the F-Pace, aligning goals to fully electrify the marque by 2025.[58] Instead, three brand new electric models will be introduced on the new JEA platform, starting with a four-door electric grand tourer in 2025.[59]

In November 2024, Jaguar launched a new logo and branding ahead of its relaunch in 2026 as an electric-only brand.“

I may be wrong, but I get the feeling Tata are throwing a number of ideas at the wall and hoping one of them sticks.

Ches

Another seemingly massive blunder is that if I go to jaguar.com I have to reject notifications and select options from drop-downs before I get to see any content. Maybe that has been considered and they just don’t want to deal with people who don’t like invasion of privacy but do like lazy web browsing…. smart.. I guess I’m never going to buy a new Jag (I guess they won’t like that shortening either).

That’s “branding” for you, even without rather desperate ways to try to improve sales.

The video conveys absolutely nothing. I wonder how much money the company wasted making it?

So many firms fall for this sort of twaddle. For example…

Does Transport for London do anything so different from London Transport as to need a new name?

Did the BBC really have to pay pointless “consultants” a lot of money to change to BBC – or was it vice-versa?

Sometimes it’s done to be deceitful: South-Western Railways, Docklands Light Railway, Great Western Railways and several other railway franchise names disguise their being all First Group.

When the government of the time started flogging off the MoD’s R&D laboratories it first turned them into the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, abbreviated to DERA, and solemnly dictated that this shalt be pronounced “Derra” (hard “e”). So all the news-readers naturally pronounced it “Dearer“… to the tax-payer?

When DERA was finally sold, it paid “branding consultants” for a new name. These superflous pseuds-in-suits invented QinetiQ, pronounced kinetic, as a physics pun. The employees had no problem with that – apart from thinking it silly – but had the Devil’s own task trying to teach its correct spelling and pronounciation to their banks, insurance companies, etc.

The Ps-in-Ss were not finished yet. They persuaded QQ to buy a “corporate font” for all internal reports, administration, etc., rather than use a standard one already on everyone’s computers. That invented by the over-paid image-concoctors, at great cost to the company, was just another horrible sans-serif font indistinguishable from the Arial or Verdana such as used here!

(A contemporary ‘Dilbert’ cartoon time rightly ridiculed that 1990s business fad by showing Dilbert investigating using the Elbonian language, apparently without consonents if I recall correctly.)

While I have abjured Opal Fruits and Marathons in protest ever since their manufacturer re-named these sweets, Starburst and Snickers. (The latter sounding more like a plimsoll brand aimed at teenagers with a similar level of fashion-fear as major corporate directors.)

—–

Copper-coloured lingerings and negligents, eh? How brazen!

I always recall Dilbert and his Salary Theorem.

Maybe the inexperienced think that rebranding the company will lose any adverse comments (Whilst unexpectantly initiating a host over the needless name change)

A surfeit of chiefs over indians?

Howard

Electric cars were already in trouble, why Jag thought this would fix anything is beyond me.

Jimb

I was spammed for a while by Russian and Ukrainian (thank spell check) women. One wrote She was in My driveway now just waiting for Me. I was afraid to even look out the window. I feared They might crinkle Me up so badly that I might not be able to be uncrinkeled.

So altogether a complex set of interleaved problems raising the awkward question of will people get about in, say, thirty years time, or will society return to something like 100 years ago when most people didn’t go very far very often, and then by rail or bus.

Will the recovery be full, however that’s measured, or to some patchy, partial level based on very few manufacturers?

On 21 November 2024 at 23:00 Nigel Graham 2 Said:

So altogether a complex set of interleaved problems raising the awkward question of will people get about in, say, thirty years time, or will society return to something like 100 years ago when most people didn’t go very far very often, and then by rail or bus.

Will the recovery be full, however that’s measured, or to some patchy, partial level based on very few manufacturers?

Indeed, except I think there will be trouble ‘getting about’ rather sooner than in 30 years.   At the moment, electric is the best technical option, despite range problems.

Hydrogen has considerable promise but the issue is safety, and it being a difficult to liquefy gas makes it hard to get enough weight into a vehicle, and leaks are scary!   Petrol heads might be enthused to know that Hydrogen is the fuel par excellence.  Burning a kilogram of Hydrogen produces 4 times more energy than burning a kilogram of oil, and about 10 times more than a kilo of best coal.  Very promising if the technical problems can be solved.

I tend to see getting new technology to work from a historical perspective.  Before about 1700, mankind completely failed to tap the potential of coal, even for domestic heating.   Difficult to ignite, and requires a grate and chimney to burn well, neither found in ordinary homes until late medieval times.   But progress being progress, new homes were eventually built with chimneys, and they were bodged into ordinary hovels too!  Efficient coal stoves had to wait for cheap cast-iron, which took another 150 years to become commonplace.  Domestic coal took a long time to become popular.

That mechanical energy could be extracted from heat was known to the ancient Greeks, but their technology wasn’t developed enough to tap into it.   Nor was the advantage of burning coal rather than wood or charcoal noticed.   A thousand years later Savery developed the first practical coal powered pump,  but it was very limited and highly inefficient.  A few decades after Savery, Newcomen put considerable thought and talent into designing his engine, by which time  blacksmithing had advanced sufficiently during the previous century for him to build one.   Though they worked, Newcomen’s engines were physically large, and there were considerable problems at first building boilers.   This despite them only needing to raise 2 or 3 psi, because the piston was worked by atmospheric pressure (clever!).

Bottom line, Newcomen engines were expensive to run, being less than 1% efficient, and were usually found pumping water out of coal mines, where cheap slack coal was available by the ton.   The cost of coal limited their spread into other applications considerably.  Fixing that needed an expensive canal network, more problems, and no sooner were they perfected than railways bit, themselves taking about a century to mature.

Smeaton widened the market by improving Newcomen’s original design, taking about 20 years to do it.  His enhancements were based on an elaborate series of experiments in which everything was measured carefully.   Applied science enabled him to roughly double efficiency.   At the same time James Watt was doing similar advanced work, concentrating on the ‘mechanical equivalent of heat’, and going beyond simply improving an existing design.   Watt came up with 7 or 8 major advances over about 40 years.  The first was the condenser.  Still a low-pressure atmospheric engine, but the condenser saved energy by keeping the cylinder hot, making the first Watt engines roughly twice as efficient as the best Smeaton/Newcomen.   Translating Watt’s idea into a real engine seriously challenged British industry, who took about 30 years to work out how to bore large diameter cylinders accurately enough to get the clearance between piston and cylinder down from about ¼” to less than ¹⁄₁₆”.

By the time technology had moved on enough to manage high-pressure steam and opened the door to further efficiencies the by then elderly Watt was dead against further progress! He felt that his engines were all the world needed.  Despite being a double-barrelled genius in his youth he was of course wrong, ending up using his considerable experience as a nay-sayer.  It’s an occupational hazard of living!

My main point though is that determined persistent effort is needed to get new ideas off the ground.  There’s always a phase during which new technology is unreliable and sits awkwardly alongside yesteryears methods.  But, after the bugs are cleaned up, the advantages of the new way overwhelm the old, which fades away.

Anyone who reads ‘Railway Magazine’ circa 1900, will find correspondents explaining why the motor car will never catch on:  good grief – the entire road network will have to be paved, and tens of thousands of refuelling points and maintenance garages built.   Won’t be possible to train enough chauffeurs,  and motor cars are an unreliable fire hazard with terrible brakes, low mph, and an appalling accident record.  In comparison, railways were safe, reliable, and 60mph wasn’t uncommon.  Obvious to them that motor cars would be a complete waste of time.

Sixty years later, ME, contains very similar letters from small-c conservatives rejecting diesels.  Dozens of objections and much delight in reporting unreliable diesels having to be towed home by good old coal burning chuff-chuffs!  Objectors didn’t read the accounts, and missing that essential information, failed to understand why steam had to go as soon as possible.  In the same period, after more than a century of superb service, stationary steam engines were being ruthlessly ripped out of factories and pumping stations across the world:  killed by electric motors, which have considerable advantages over steam.  Lots of folk didn’t understand that either.  These changes were all costly, took considerable effort, and had many misadventures on the way.   But ten years later, Britain’s steam based infrastructure was gone.   And it disappeared everywhere else in the world too – rapidly in advanced economies, more slowly in poorer countries.

Tempus fugit, and now it’s our turn to face up to the need for major change.   Fighting change is a waste of time I think – the forces driving it are beyond individuals, or even nations.   In the end, what happens is mostly decided by the need to earn money.  Though engineering and politics have influence, the main drivers are economic – individuals, businesses, nations, and trade blocs deciding how best to spend their money, causing a constant need to produce more from less.

Will recovery be full?  I don’t know!  I doubt it, we’re tap-dancing on thin ice.  For example, US voters feeling the heat, have elected a president who threatens a trade-war. He believes in tariffs too.  His main target is China, but America First includes all foreigners, including us.  At present the UK is badly placed relative to the US because we’re outside the powerful European Union and – so far – haven’t concluded a trade deal with the US.  Instead we trade on the rather unfavourable US rules they apply to countries who don’t have a trade deal which makes the UK particularly vulnerable if a ‘US first’ policy is applied.

At the same time, China’s economy is showing signs of strain and might even go pop.  If it does, there will be wide repercussions.   For example, Australia earns a lot of money by exporting huge quantities of coal to China:  if China suddenly stopped importing coal, then Australia will be hurt, perhaps badly, reducing their ability to import from the West, which will hurt us.

More problems in other economies around the world; none are rock-solid.  And now trade is globalised the impact of a sudden major change anywhere ripples round the planet.  Beyond knowing there will be winners and losers, it’s difficult to predict what will happen next.  A great deal depends on confidence.   Might resolve in smiles all round, though hard-liners make that unlikely.  Cycles of boom and bust are probale, and maybe a full-scale global depression, and more shooting wars.  I hope not!

Jaguar’s advert isn’t aimed at Model Engineers so what we make of it is irrelevant.  I do say though that it’s generated a massive amount of free advertising for Jaguar, and our not understanding that is a good reason for not employing Model Engineers in Advertising Departments.  We’re unfamiliar with what Millennials and Zoomers are up to and don’t “get it”.

Although time is remorseless, there is humour in it.  My kids are millennials, a group now mature enough for youth to find their attitudes and beliefs ‘old-fashioned’.  Only yesterday my daughter and I laughed about her first grey hairs and our mutual total ignorance of today’s pop-music…

Dave

Just watched a video of a JLR executive at an awards presentation extoling the virtues of their WOKE approach to the future of JLR.  It was sickening to watch him in his sparkly jacket and net vest.  What’s the betting the new line-up come in every shade of pink?  Was it “fake news”?  That’s anybody’s guess.

The very fact that we are still discussing the Jag advert will suggest that the advertising and marketing dept that made this ad have done a good job.

“No such thing as bad publicity”

Btw, I thought the marketing dept where I used to work, were a load of idiots and knew nothing about our product, and for example, spent weeks deciding on the “correct” shade of blue. I suppose it was important – to them. The product however, despite their marketing spin, was rubbish!