There is an old line in marketing that the only bad publicity is no publicity. It survives mostly because it is almost impossible to disprove while the campaign is still running. Attention is easy to count.
A launch film can collect hundreds of millions of impressions in a week and still leave the people who write six-figure checks feeling talked down to. No dashboard separates those two numbers in real time. That gap is where most brand reinventions quietly die.
Companies rarely say so out loud. The usual move is to call the noise proof of relevance, wait for the cycle to turn, then rewrite the plan in private and never mention the rewrite. So it is unusual when the executive who fronted one of those campaigns comes back years later and says the reaction changed what his company did next.
That is what just happened with the most mocked rebrand in recent automotive memory. In November 2024, Jaguar published a launch film full of models in bright couture on a pink landscape, stamped with the words "delete ordinary," "break moulds" and "copy nothing." Not one car appeared in it. The film was meant to reposition Jaguar as an electric-only luxury brand priced somewhere near Bentley and Rolls-Royce.
What it produced instead was a culture-war fight the company was not staffed to win. Gerry McGovern, the former chief creative officer at Jaguar Land Rover who fronted the launch, now says he did not see it coming. "I didn't even know what wokeism meant at the time," he said, according to Automotive News.
Related: Jaguar Land Rover reveals shocking update in wake of cyberattack The more consequential part is what came after. Jaguar decided the campaign was being misread and scrapped planned follow-up communications rather than push through with them, McGovern said in the same interview. That is not a defense of the work.
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