If you thought you were having a bad day then imagine being a salesman in a Jaguar cars showroom. A brand that’s established such a muscular heritage brand, selling thoroughbred cars balancing the tightrope between luxury and street, bullish and elegant, that it effectively sells itself. The marque itself is synonymous with the aspirational working class once replacing south London scrap metal yards with slightly ostentatious suburban homes and a Jaguar car parked outside. It was byword for classy. Until it became a laughing stock with its new advert featuring lots of gender bland people dressed like Teletubbies without a car in sight. It looks more like a promo for a circus you pray will leave town.
Surely the first rule of advertising is: know your audience. As with life, read the room. There’s nothing wrong with woke selling woke products. There’s no problem with a man in a dress marketing self-flagellation paddles to customers’ hoping it will offset ancestral involvement with the north Atlantic slave trade, when in fact they were probably scraping their own living by nicking coal from slag heaps and eating onions. But luxury cars, financially out of reach for most students even if they wanted one, which they’ve been carefully groomed by clean air hybrid buses not to, are probably ill-advised to apply the woke virus to flog their goods.
It was once easy to know when you needed a new car. It was when your rear wheels were overtaking the front, or you needed to turn up the radio to drown out the bumpers grinding beneath the chassis. However, according to Jaguar it’s when your car isn’t committed to a diverse, inclusive and unified culture. Thankfully their U.K. Brand Director Santino Pietrosanti has addressed this. Jaguar is “committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive and unified culture that is representative not only of the people who use our products, but in a society in which we all live”. he says, somehow without sniggering. It’s unclear when our unified culture was Dune remade by Dulux test cards. After all, there’s nothing that gives life more meaning than using a product, let’s say a candle, or a dish cloth, that is representative of the society in which we live. As we live in a society utterly intolerant of any opinion conflicting with governmental doctrine in say replacement migration, deindustrialisation, Net Zero, eroding the (tax-earning) private sector in favour of the (tax-spending) public sector, multiple genders, and dependence upon foreign gas supply for energy, its hard not to see the product best representing this as a fascist.
We have so blindly nailed ourselves to ‘progressive’ politics that any previously held views are described as fossilised and small-minded, as though arrogance in contemporary beliefs erasing thousands of years of human experience is somehow open-minded.
Aiming a car advert at a generation of people who not only can’t drive, but have been led to believe cars are evil, apart from when their parents drive them to the Just Stop Oil protest, is like selling guns to pacifists.
When challenged on Twitter about the absence of actual cars in the ad, Jaguar replied with ‘Think of this as a declaration of intent.’ Intent for what? This response is either swallowing back the impulse to scream ‘what the fuck is this advert?’ and style it out, or Jaguar actually think that dressing blanded gender types with what appears to be the inside of a six year old girl’s head is somehow relevant to the thrill of throwing an F-type into an S-bend. The only intent here is seemingly to destroy another car brand. It’s as though the advertising agency know the Jaguar board will be so scared of appearing racist, genderist, fattist, rainbowist, or shit clothesist, that they’ll allow the company’s stocks go to the wall. Being called names is now more powerful than the need for a robust commercial company employing people and paying tax, but at least its one step nearer to achieving Agenda at any cost.
Generation snooze are far too dependent upon safe spaces, blue hair dye and unchallenging public sector non-jobs to comprehend the real world impact of their luxury beliefs. The problem is they are now steering governments with all the life experience of tadpoles. If not the actual people, they are the sort of people that think replacing a predatory as you emblem with the badge of a black market perfume is a good idea.
It’s not as if the car industry isn’t already in trouble. Although not because there’s no appetite for cars - well, apart from generation Zzzz and their reluctance to drive - but due to State interference. Their adulation of Net Zero and adherence to the self-imposed self harm of the UN’s Agenda 2030 means European car companies are going to the wall, because whenever governments involve themselves in business they reveal their utter ignorance in how to make money. Governments, like children, are only good at spending money, not making it. In this case it’s forcing the car industry to sell EV cars that no one wants because they’re shit, and fining them for it. Fining a manufacturer for not selling enough goods the consumer doesn’t want is going to need some pretty effective advertising. Teletubby woke types lost in a soft play area isn’t going to cut it. Funny that. What this mess is really selling is nails in the coffin of the car industry.
What constantly amazes me is how all the woke stuff came about and how quickly it seems to have taken hold. I'm 63 and none of this nonsense existed through most of my life yet it has become mainstream in the last 10 years or so. Has my generation failed so badly that it did not bother to instill core values into our children so they had so few core values to pass on to theirs? The fact that this Jaguar ad exists means there are people out there who believe this nonsense and are so unaware of what the majority think, or simply do not care that we are in for some very dark times.
And it's this lot that Starmer thinks will fight battled hardened Russkies to defend our wonderful 'democratic' society. I gave up on them all during the 'covid' years, the scales finally falling off my eyes.