Wicked collabs, body maxxing, and Jaguar travels a new road
Woefully woke or wonderfully weird?
If you read this newsletter, there’s a good chance you already know about Jaguar’s brand repositioning. This was big news in marketing and automotive circles, and with good reason. The iconic British sports car and luxury sedan firm has a heritage that stretches back a century, although in an ironic piece of reverse-colonialism, Jaguar is now a subsidiary of Indian automotive behemoth Tata Motors. My own favorite car of all time is the E-Type from just before I was born. Its design oozes stylish aerodynamic class. I’m no gearhead, but I do know a nice car when I see one, and the E-Type jag is a really nice car.
The current Jaguar rebrand began with the reveal of a new logo in November that ditched the eponymous animal imagery. The wordmark was already creating waves among fans when Jaguar veered off the traditional highway completely by releasing a short film which would have been a 30-second TV ad except that the company called it a “social media tease”. This video featured eight people with a wide range of ages and body types emerging from a futuristic elevator then posing weirdly in an otherworldly landscape. Their vivid red, orange, yellow, and pink outfits wouldn't look out of place on a high-fashion catwalk. And that was entirely intentional.
After these edgy individuals finish strutting about, the video's tagline – a new corporate slogan – appears: “Copy nothing.” If the intention was to send an unmissable signal that Jaguar had revolutionized its positioning, the company’s in-house marketing team definitely understood the assignment.
In terms of getting visibility and provoking a reaction, job done. Basically, Jaguar broke the automobile internet. Had Lewis Hamilton announced he was swapping Formula 1 for ice dancing, there would have been less outrage. According to online trolls who aren’t Jaguar owners anyway, the brand had “gone woke”. The new US government’s Troll-in-Chief, Elon Musk, posted: “Do you sell cars?” on his toxic platform, while others wrote, "Go woke, go broke".
[Sidebar: Musk knows literally nothing about advertising. Tesla became a big name without running any ads. Besides, many successful ad campaigns like this Apple one do not show the product.]
But what about the cars themselves? It’s almost four years since Jaguar announced a plan to go all-electric by 2025. In the meantime, other manufacturers have followed Tesla’s lead and leaned into the electric car business. Jaguar already has an electric vehicle called the I-PACE, but reviews and sales have been unimpressive and the company’s overall market share has dwindled to economic irrelevance. Jaguar had no choice but to take extreme action by changing its fundamental business model. And the events of the last few weeks demonstrate that it has pushed all of its design and marketing chips onto the table.
Whatever your opinion on the logo and teaser video, Jaguar managed to foment a fever pitch of hype on a relatively tiny budget. Curiosity had risen to a crescendo when, at the beginning of December, a stunning Type 00 electric concept vehicle was revealed at Art Week Miami. A corporate event showcased pink and blue models which somehow transposed the unique lines of the E-Type onto brushed metal sculptures that are guaranteed to make everyone on the street stop and stare. (And not in the way a snowbound Tesla Cybertruck got attention in Alberta last week).
Let’s get back to branding basics for a minute. It would have been easy for Jaguar’s parent company to say, “Well, we aren’t selling many cars, but the one thing of value we do have is our brand, so we should go electric while doubling down on the feline imagery. Maybe a neon green jungle cat?” But the effect would have been a blip. The cold, hard fact is that the market has changed. First, Jaguar buyers from my dad’s generation (for whom the Jaguar was aspirational) are literally dying out. Second, the planet is also dying, and many younger people blame the oil industry that is intricately linked with internal combustion engines. Third, trust-fund Millennials often seek to express their individuality (and wealth) with flashy, artsy, fashionable luxury products that simply can’t be copied by less-classy brands. You might be able to buy a knock-off Hermès Birkin bag, but you can’t buy a knock-off iconic car.
The problem for Jaguar is that for rich people under 40 in the world’s most lucrative markets (the US, China, Dubai, Saudi Arabia), the brand isn’t even on their radar. Its only hope was therefore to make a big splash by signaling that this car is for people who want to signal a particular identity centered on avant-garde taste and environmental sense.
Conservative-minded individuals might like the smell of gasoline and the roar of an engine. They might also like tough men and sexy ladies in their car ads. But the world has moved on, and people who are genuinely cool find that stuff cringe.
This entire marketing strategy was necessary because Jaguar’s business needed to change. When you want potential customers to understand that you have entered a new category (in this case the luxury electric car market) a complete brand makeover sends a clear signal. The worst thing that Jaguar could have done was to cling to the past. Even the “Miami Pink” and “London Blue” colors chosen for the concept models hitch a cultural ride on the gender expression bandwagon featured in the teaser video.
The anti-woke trolls who slated Jaguar’s new positioning not only don’t understand business and branding, they don’t even realize that the Jaguar brand had already changed for the worse. After starting this article, I recalled an almost insignificant memory from around 2016 that demonstrates the absolute necessity for Jaguar to evolve today. I was driving my Subaru Outback one afternoon when I pulled up alongside what I realized was a Jaguar F-Pace compact SUV. It was the first time I had seen one and I felt a twinge of sadness. What had they done to their heritage? Where was the style? Had they sold their soul for some extra market share? That vehicle was a terrible brand positioning mistake. My childhood love of the E-Type had been gutted. There was nothing about the F-Pace to make you turn your head.
What did this new marketing initiative achieve? It turned heads. And the Type 00 cars will also turn heads.
As a postscript, do you know where the “copy nothing” slogan came from? Was it produced by a team of jaded copywriters or spewed out by ChatGPT? Traditionalists who have wailed about this woke repositioning can rest easy. Those words were authored by the company’s founder, Sir William Lyons, who once said: “A Jaguar should be a copy of nothing.” No matter how revolutionary this business transformation and brand repositioning is, there will always be blinkered observers who are incapable of imagining that the original Jaguar was also a groundbreaking automotive and cultural force.
Wicked marketing collabs defy gravity
“There are enough women in the world. If you make something that is truly an event for them, they will show up.” This is the recent movie-musical Wicked’s marketing approach according to Universal Pictures CMO Michael Moses, and it’s why the Wicked marketing team signed deals with over 400 brands to represent every possible “girly” product you can imagine, including: makeup (Ariana Grande’s r.e.m. beauty), women’s clothing (from Target to upscale Camilla), hair tools (Conair and Shark), bags (Cambridge Satchel and Beis), accessories (Aldo), skincare (Beekman), bath stuff (Lush), nail polish (OPI), squishmallows, dolls, Stanley cups, and even a cupcake/cakepop mix that turns either pink or green as a surprise.
There was a significant degree of crossover with the Barbie movie brand collabs, though Wicked raked in double the brands and added the color green. The real “holy grail” according to the CMO, was bagging a brand deal with Starbucks (also kind of a girly brand, as most of their clientele is female), who are “very selective” about who they partner with. Starbucks Studios is releasing its own movie in 2025, so perhaps this explains why the picky PSL pushers have decided movie marketing is the move. Or, they figured that Starbucks green and Elphaba green are a match made in marketing heaven (or Oz). Either way, you can now wear, bathe in, bake, and slather on Wicked products and have a Wicked drink to put in a Wicked Stanley to boot! The Wicked brand blitz shows how ubiquity can be achieved in a world with less monoculture than ever before by meeting fans where they’re at in their consumer journeys. Not only did Wicked target every possible product for women and girls, but they also did their due diligence with some stereotypically “masculine” marketing by premiering the trailer at the Super Bowl and releasing Lego sets. And for those who aren’t “chronically online” (the CMO’s words), Wicked marketing stunts appeared IRL, lighting up the Empire State building and the Arc de Triomphe with pink and green. So, basically, by the movie’s release date, you’d have to be flattened by a flying house not to know about Wicked.
AI movie channel features slop flops
If you wanted to compete with Netflix by making original shows and movies, but didn’t have even a fraction of the budget to do so, and didn’t mind making soulless slop, what would you do? Use AI, of course! TCL, the largest TV manufacturer on Earth, released five AI-generated short films for its free streaming service, TCL+ (powered by targeted ads) on December 12, and they are just as bad as you’d expect. With uncanny faces and warped backgrounds, the only short that kind of works is the one where the main character transforms into a slug (title: The Slug), because the inherent uncanniness of AI animation suits the body-horror vibe. The rest of the films try to compensate for horribly glitchy human-ish characters by incorporating real actors occasionally, frequently not showing characters speaking, and substituting an excessive amount of narration instead.
Addressing the flagrant inconsistencies and characters who don’t even look like themselves at different points, TCL’s chief content officer, Chris Regina, said: “There are just as many continuity errors in major live-action films as there are in AI,” revealing that he hasn’t watched these films at all.
To protect against accusations of displacing artists with AI, TCL proclaims that they used real writers, actors, voice actors, and composers to help make the films, which are “stories about people, made by people, but powered by AI,” with over 50 artists involved on the 12-week long projects.
But, let’s be real, TCL knows these short films suck. What they want is to keep eyes on TCL+ screens out of outrage/intrigue/laziness long enough to bring in revenue from targeted ads, and they think they’ll get away with it because their internal data suggests that many users on TLC+ are “too lazy to change the channel.”
Is this the future of filmmaking? Not if we can somehow drum up the energy to change the channel.
Getting the maxx out of 2024
The suffix “-maxxing”, from “maximizing,” started as jargon in “incel” (involuntarily celibate) online circles in the context of “looksmaxxing,” meaning to improve physical attractiveness through natural means like diet and exercise (“softmaxxing”) or invasive measures like steroids and surgical procedures (“hardmaxxing”). But when the term blew up on TikTok this year, maxxing got incorporated into everything from sleepmaxxing (getting enough sleep) to potassiummaxxing (eating tons of bananas?).
Even though there are loads of harmless and funny spins on maxxing’s seedier roots, its dark underbelly remains. Things like gymmaxxing and smellmaxxing (smelling good) are innocuous, but other maxxings are intended to make regular folk more attractive no matter the cost: for example, testosteronemaxxing (steroids) and starvemaxxing. Maxxing often leans into gendered conventional beauty standards and encourages gym bros and Instagram coaches to share unqualified health and fitness advice that can be straight-up dangerous. Even the maxxings supposedly focused on just “health” (like sleepmaxxing) tend to be less about feeling good, and more about how good they will make you look.
The more maxxing trends you find, the clearer it becomes that most are an outgrowth of the incel obsession with being more dateable. For example, geomaxxing, which is specifically about relocating to places with more eligible singles. While the heavy focus on physical appearance can make it easy to point fingers at the Gen Z maxxers for being shallow, there is another factor feeding into the maxxing explosion: Gen Z’s dating struggles. The Survey Center on American Life reported that only 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they were involved in a romantic relationship at any point during their teenage years, in stark contrast to Baby Boomers (78 percent) and Generation Xers (76 percent). It seems like many maxxers fall into the trap of believing physical perfection is a relationship requirement, when what’s missing might really be community and connectionmaxxing.
Hannah Arendt, historian and philosopher
This is the time of year when people who can’t get together with friends or family risk feeling especially lonely. Sociologists have been talking about an epidemic of loneliness for almost a decade, but unfortunately this isn’t something new. Over half a century ago, Hannah Arendt perceived how the exaggerated connections of modern life can simultaneously leave us feeling isolated. And this was before online platforms and digital devices invaded our every waking moment.
“The mass phenomenon of loneliness…has achieved its most extreme and antihuman form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world.” – from The Human Condition, 1958
Climate crunch time
Global warming isn’t just causing unprecedented flooding, raging wildfires, melting ice sheets, intense droughts, and deadly storms. Agriculture is being destabilized the world over, with disruption to farming practices that have been relied upon for generations. In India, recent data shows that over $5 billion in crops have been lost due to unexpected climate-related events.
Now PepsiCo has introduced the Smart Farm initiative to India, a platform that aims to empower 27,000 potato farmers with app-based tools to help them meet the challenges posed by climate change and ensure that the supply of produce for Lay’s chips is maintained. From monitoring weather with satellite imagery to tracking pest infestations and identifying optimal irrigation times, Smart Farm is designed to make agricultural practices more resilient and adaptive.
To a certain extent, this is capitalism at its finest. Farmers get free tech and training to improve yields and rely less on fertilizer and pesticides while a global agrifood conglomerate maximizes profits. But, of course, human-caused climate change is driven by the industrialization that has fueled capitalism for decades. Still, at least India will be able to keep munching on snacks while the country overheats.
Did Dickens invent Christmas Day?
In his heyday, Charles Dickens was almost certainly the most famous and possibly the richest author in the world. Scalper tickets to his stage readings on his second tour of the US were at Taylor Swift prices. And what was the book that propelled him into the literary stratosphere when his post-Oliver Twist career seemed to be stalling? A Christmas Carol.
This episode of the NPR Throughline podcast suggests is that the Christmas Day we celebrate today only became a cultural tradition because of Dickens’s book and his constant lobbying on behalf of the working poor and against child labor. Who better to make the case than his great-great-great granddaughter Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, a historian of Victorian Britain.
So when you’re relaxing at home on December 25th, imagine that if it wasn’t for the efforts of Charles Dickens, you (and your children!) might be working as though it was just an ordinary day!
Words of thanks
This is the final Discomfort Zone of 2024 and I’d like to thank all my readers for encouraging me, as well as giving a special shout-out to Silvia Todea, who has helped out since I started working at the NFB by researching and writing most of the FOMOfood items.
Have a wonderful holiday season, and here’s to less real-life discomfort in 2025!
Did you enjoy this issue of Discomfort Zone? You can comment directly in the Substack app or drop me a line by emailing me at john@johnbdutton.com.
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FOMO food research and writing by Silvia Todea, editing by John Dutton.
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