The Tories need a woke Jaguar rebrand 🐆🌈

It's time for the Conservatives to reflect modern Britain

You’re annoyed by the Jaguar rebrand? Excellent. Frankly, it’s art. I couldn’t have thought of a better way to wind up a bunch of cantankerous camshaft crumblies and get some ink in the papers.

The ‘woke’ advert couldn’t have whacked more culture war buttons without castrating the iconic Growler and giving it new pronouns. You couldn’t pay the Telegraph, Daily Express and Daily Mail combined to write and publish an advertorial with so much reach, for so little effort. Jaguar has a wry, iconoclastic sense of humour.

Your irritation contains a valuable lesson: it doesn’t matter whether you think you have a stake in Jaguar’s brand, even if your demographic was historically its biggest customer – if you and your contemporaries don’t support it with your cold, hard cash today, you don’t have a say in its direction.

Jaguar’s rebrand æsthetic has unsubtly whacked every culture war button like Will Ferrel’s Elf in a department store lift. Image source: Jaguar.

Faced with extinction after the asteroid blast of electrification hit the motoring industry, Jaguar had no choice but to evolve. Its brand recognition, heritage and history are things to be proud of, and still hold significant cultural – if limited monetary – value. But Jaguar could not live forever, unchanged in a changing world. The Growler is dead, long live the Growler.

By actively looking beyond its late-middle age, caddish, ‘sorry darling, I seem to have forgotten my wallet’ brand identity, the company has taken a bet that it’s worth using the assets it has today to pivot to a new, more affluent customer base – with different motivations, values and æsthetics.

Speaking to a new base doesn’t mean it has to wholly abandon its explicitly British roots, sense of humour and reputation for innovation. These valuable brand associations can remain even as the way the company talks about them becomes radically different. Better to attempt a moonshot than be remembered alongside Blockbuster, British Leyland and Kodak as an example of a sad, slow, bleed-out into obscurity.

Another brand associated with an older, more traditional demographic faces similar challenges. It simply isn’t viable in its current form – targeting only its limited and dwindling number of core customers with messages that they want to hear, rather than speaking to and acting in the interests of an expanded customer base of tomorrow. It is insular; deaf to and uninterested in the outside world. It needs to understand modern Britain.

It’s time for the Tory party to become woke.

Right, that’s the SEO and the gratuitously inflammatory article hook sorted. What do I actually mean? I mean the party needs to look beyond the piss-poor 6,828,925 members of the electorate that it managed to cling on to by its fingernails in the 2024 general election, in which scored 23.7% of the vote and only 121 seats, the worst showing in its history.

Kemi Badenoch’s victory in the Conservative leadership election worries me not because she doesn’t have an authentic conservatism rooted in her life experiences and with an intellectual underpinning, but because the Badenoch project seems so far to have been based solely on preaching to the choir.

Wanging on about woke, or even appearing to do so, is a self-indulgence that might motivate the base – but comes across as just odd and obsessional to normal folk, who don’t spend all day doing the same.

Bathrooms matter, but do they matter to a normal voter as much as the cost of childcare? Cultural conventions on gender identity and expression matter, but do they matter as much as the cost of housing to someone renting from a slumlord with no chance, like their parents’, of homeownership?

Where are the broad brush stroke soliloquies about how the party even cares about these totemic issues that are central and fundamental to so many voter’s lives and living standards, let alone having a defined and deliverable plan to sort them out?

Obscure farming documentary maker Jeremy Clarkson observed long ago that if you include petrolheads in the design choices of your vehicle, you will end up with a car that goes around the Nürburgring three seconds faster at the expense of a comfier ride for everyday commuting. Mass consumers suffer for the minority interests of obsessives.

It’s not that these cultural topics aren’t worth discussing. But Labour was given permission by the electorate to enter Number 10 not just because of the manifest and myriad failings of the Conservatives, but because it purposefully avoided stepping on culture war landmines.

It’s still abundantly clear that Labour activists and MPs hold socially progressive views that are out of step with the wider public’s – but by not framing them front and centre of their case for a Labour government and instead focusing on the cost of living and Tory incompetence, the potential dividing line was neatly sidestepped. Labour didn’t shave three seconds off the lap time, it went for the softer suspension.

Younger readers may scoff, but there is still a deeply embedded cultural memory of the Conservative brand representing sound money, sound governance, and steady-as-she-goes economic growth. The Conservatives were a conservative party, not reactionary party. These are immensely powerful, emotional and basal brand identity associations.

The most successful party of the 20th century was successful for a reason – it had a strong brand that represented the comfort of the familiar, the temperance of exuberance, the reassurance of tradition, backed up by governance that supported these associations. But times have changed. Serving only the interests of its core voter base has made it forget about its core voter base of tomorrow.

What does Nick (30 ans) care about institutions that are milking, instead of serving him? Why should he value the familiar, when it isn’t working for him? These values only have a cultural memory so long as they have a demonstrable credibility.

With much less to lose than there is to gain, it’s time for the Tory party to take a risk, and place a bet on speaking a language that might even alienate much of its diminished remaining voter base. It’s time to wind up the Conservative crumblies, and explicitly make a case for itself to the people that regard it at best with casual disinterest.

There is no future without a wider, renewed electoral coalition – a new customer base that looks very different from its old base. Yes, the remaining seven or eight voters will kick off. But maybe the voters they actually need to pitch to to have a viable future might start listening. It’s time for the Conservatives to go woke, before they end up broke.