Every brand wants an ad campaign that everyone is talking about. Unfortunately, there are two kinds of those.
The quickly infamous Jaguar ad campaign is the Ayds candy of car ad campaigns. The ad campaign featured no cars, but did cover the LGBTQ identity politics color spectrum. Why would a car brand set itself on fire that way?
To understand the insane Jaguar ad campaign, you also have to understand that EV mandates are breaking car companies.
Affordable EVs are unaffordable for car manufacturers. However, EV mandates require making EVs anyway and the only way to make money is to make electric luxury SUVs
Electric luxury SUVs are a tiny market that everyone is chasing.
An aggressive LGBTQ rebrand for a car company makes no sense, but when your products are $70K SUVs aimed at a small wealthy demographic, it starts to make sense to chase a tiny wealthy demo with a lot of disposable income in the hopes they’ll buy them while alienating 90% of car buyers.
It’s senseless in the larger business sense, but so is the EV business for most companies. Within the context of the EV business, branding yourself as an obnoxiously woke company does make sense because the people likely to spend $70K on a luxury SUV fall into two categories: traditionally wealthy or wealthy woke.
And luxury EV buyers are more likely to be woke.
Is the move going to pay off for Jaguar? No. But none of the western companies that don’t start with a ‘T’ chasing the EV market are going to do anything except lose a bunch of money anyway.
A lot of companies went woke and lost customers, but EVs don’t really have any non-woke customers to lose.
Democrats (22%) are also far more likely than both Republicans (1%) and independents (12%) to say they are seriously considering purchasing an EV. The majority of Democrats, 54%, say they may consider it in the future. Meanwhile, a substantial majority of Republicans, 71%, say they would not consider owning an electric vehicle.
Americans aged 35-54 are more likely than those younger and older to already own or be seriously considering buying an electric vehicle. However, young adults 18-34 are most likely to say they may buy one in the future.
In the Venn diagram of Democrats between 30 and 50 who will drop $70K on an electric SUV, wokeness probably scores pretty well. When your only customer base is the woke 1% of the population anyway.
All of this is still bad news for Jaguar as a traditional car company, but any traditional car company that goes EV is committing suicide anyway. Just ask Ford and GM.