Discarding your audience isn’t for the faint-hearted but Jaguar seems to be happy doing just that though with their latest rebrand and new cars.
Their average buyer is mid to late 50’s (and I suspect male), who they’ve pretty much chosen to ignore in their rebrand and how they reposition themselves, instead deciding to double the cost of the cars and being happy in their assumption that they’ll lose 85% of their existing customers (I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that board meeting).
At the same time they’ve dropped pretty much all their distinctive assets (the updated Leaper is a nice evolution though) and pursue an interesting aesthetic of bauhaus meets RoboCop via Miami with the cars looking absolutely huge and as if they were designed by someone who got a set square for Christmas and was excited to play with it.
So if you drop all the heritage, the distinctive assets, the customer base and radically change the product – when is it a rebrand and when is it just a completely new company?
— Know your audience
