AI transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Support for the show comes from HubSpot.
How do you begin to describe your job as a marketer?
You have to generate leads, create content, and gather data.
You’re spread way too thin, but HubSpot has a better way.
With the help of Breeze, HubSpot’s collection
of AI tools and features, like Content Remix,
turn one piece of content into a suite of assets,
pinpoint the best prospects, and level up your campaign’s
KPIs with a new analytic suite.
And most importantly, you’ll have a way easier time describing
your job at parties.
Visit hubspot.com/marketers to learn more.
Amazon Q Business is the generative AI assistant from AWS
because business can be slow, like wading through the mud.
But Amazon Q helps streamline work,
so tasks like summarizing monthly results
can be done in no time.
Learn when Amazon Q Business can do for you at aws.com/learnmore.
That’s aws.com/learnmore.
For over 30 years, XPRIZE has been the global leader
in designing and executing large-scale incentivized
competitions.
And through these competitions, they’ve accelerated solutions
to some of the world’s greatest challenges,
such as climate change, water scarcity, and healthy aging,
just to name a few.
XPRIZE is a catalyst for radical breakthroughs
that have impacted the lives of millions,
and they’re just getting started.
Through the power of incentivized competition,
XPRIZE can drive scientific discovery, cutting-edge
innovation, and groundbreaking solutions.
The future is still ours to create.
Head to XPRIZE.org to learn how you could help architect
a future of equitable abundance.
I’m Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice.
Jaguar is giving us more proof that the era of brands
is over, killing the cat, as read by George Hahn.
Jaguar, a brand that’s been in a coma for years,
is trying to wake up, and it’s gasping.
The car-free copy-nothing-kickoff video
and the rollout of a pink concept EV at Art Basel, Miami,
have inspired well-earned mockery.
The launch rivaled Elon’s WeRobot event
for the all-chip-no-sauce-of-product launch of 2024.
Getting attention is key to any marketing campaign,
so mission accomplished, sort of.
Tata Motors, which owns Jaguar and its stable-mate Land Rover,
has also succeeded in further eroding
what’s left of Jaguar’s brand equity.
Jaguar trashed its iconic logo, all its current models,
and its traditional promise of speed, power, and elegance.
In their place is an uninspired and generic brand mark,
a concept model that will never be put into production,
and an incomprehensible promise,
something about good-looking people,
bright colors, and exotic haircuts.
A lot has been said about this HBRK study
that’s writing itself,
including some predictable culture war bullshit
about Jaguar having gone woke.
Most of this misses the larger point,
which is that Jaguar’s move is further proof
that the brand age is over.
Just as doctors have a Hippocratic oath,
chief marketing officers ought to have a similar pledge.
First, do no harm.
I’ve advised lots of big consumer brands
about their marketing,
and I’ve noticed that CMOs recognize their days are numbered
and are desperate to show visible motion,
whether it makes sense or not.
Often that activity, devoid of progress,
means spending lots of money on a new agency
stocked with sharply dressed young people
who will host events giving awards
to whoever spent the most money
across the advertising industrial complex.
I’m honored to be part of this brand’s history,
and I’m shocked how well my predecessors
managed the brand, said no CMO ever.
The typical incoming speech?
Thank God I’m here, we need to redo everything.
Which is usually self-defeating.
For about 50 years following World War II,
it was good business to churn out a mediocre product
and then surround it with emotion, i.e. branding.
On any given night, about 60% of America
was in one of three places,
ABC, CBS, or NBC.
Via the miracle of TV advertising,
a few cents worth of peanut paste
could be transubstantiated into a jar of maternal love
as choosy mothers choose Jif.
In the age of the internet,
network television is in hospice.
Exhibit A, the proposed merger of Omnicom and Interpublic.
When I started Profit, a brand strategy consultancy,
these firms were the alphabets and metas of the economy.
Now they’re consolidating,
two emaciated polar bears fighting over fewer seals
and sharing a melting piece of ice.
The previous sentence is both awful and wonderful,
mostly the former.
Brands mean a lot less than they used to.
Consumers now have a range of weapons of mass diligence
to help them find and rate products,
starting with Google and social media.
I travel constantly, so I used to rely on well-known brands
when booking hotels in cities I didn’t know well.
The name Mandarin Oriental, or Four Seasons,
meant I could consistently expect and get
a seven or eight level customer experience.
Lately though, I’ve been using ChatGPT and other AI tools
to find nines that better fit the moment and me.
The gym at the Soho House Berlin,
the rooftop restaurant at the Waldorf in Beverly Hills,
the bar at Chiltern Firehouse.
If I sound like a privileged douchebag, trust your instincts.
The internet has diminished the power of even strong brands
and it’s penetrated the shield of good branding
from mediocre products like Nike, Intel, Target, et cetera.
A product or service that cannot fulfill its promise
to make you smarter or sexier can’t reverse its fortunes
by listening to Don Draper.
And inventing and refining a great product,
fixing its supply chain and improving your customer service
is a lot more work than turning to mid-journey
and asking for a new logo.
Jaguar’s problem for a long time has been products
that didn’t live up to the brand promise.
Well after its swinging London ’60s heyday,
Ford bought the company in 1989
and it’s now owned by India’s Tata.
It still manufactures the car in Coventry, UK,
thus technically preserving the Britishness
that’s key to its brand identity.
Although they’ve improved, the cars continue to be dogged
by a lingering reputation as mechanical nightmares.
Anybody who drove one was making the statement,
“I’m a gangster who probably owns two of these status symbols
because one is always in the shop.”
Style-wise, Jaguar’s current lineup has little of the illan
of the legendary E-type or other classic models.
In terms of sales in the premium car market,
Jaguar is an afterthought behind category leaders
BMW and Audi.
With a few exceptions,
Jaguar hasn’t been able to make anything
in the $50,000 plus price range that anybody wants to buy.
Jaguar’s current business response to this makes sense.
Management decided to wind the company down
and relaunch it.
Jaguar is ending production of its three current models
and retooling to produce an all-new, all-electric line.
It’s also decided to abandon the premium market
and go further upscale into luxury cars priced
at around $400,000.
This is a smaller market with fatter margins,
so the company is closing some dealerships.
All of which points to something that’s gone mostly
unremarked in the chatter about Jaguar’s rebrand.
Jaguar doesn’t see any growth selling
to lawyers and dentists,
but it does see a future selling
to entrepreneurs and financiers.
It’s going to be at least a year, however,
before any new era Jaguars go on sale.
No one outside the company knows how they will look
or what will be under the hood.
The clunky pink Type 00 sports tank Jaguar introduced
in Miami is a concept car.
It will never go into production.
I’ve been to a lot of car conventions
and seen a lot of concept cars.
In my view, they’re a waste of effort and money,
no matter how sexy.
They’re shiny, one-off marketing props.
Ivanka Trump is seriously more likely to be president
than the Tesla RoboVan is ever to be produced.
So with a dark year ahead of it
and no new product ready to show customers,
Jaguar decided to fix the one thing that wasn’t broken.
The new brand mark makes it seem Jaguar is relaunching
as an AI consulting firm.
The logo looks as if it was designed by AI
and never tested with real people.
According to one respondent to an entirely
unscientific survey I conducted on Instagram,
it, quote, would be a great logo for a kitchen knife set,
unquote.
One of the most precious things a company can possess
is a powerful logo, one that imprints itself on the eye
and instantly tells the brand story.
Humans are visually oriented.
Written language is only about 5,000 years old
and the printing press is less than 600 years old,
but visual communication via drawn or painted images
dates back to our Neanderthal ancestors.
That’s right, it may even predate our existence as a species.
We process visual information about 60,000 times faster
than we do words.
Researchers at MIT once estimated that the human brain
can correctly identify an image
in as little as 13 milliseconds.
When I talk about logos in my marketing class,
I demonstrate their power by asking students
if they can identify a mark using just their peripheral vision.
Great logos, the Nike Swoosh, the McDonald’s Arches,
the Mercedes three-pointed star,
are immediately recognizable even almost outside
our plane of vision.
An effective logo needs to be meaningful,
resonant, distinctive, and scalable.
Jaguar’s pouncing cat, which it called the leaper,
was all that.
There are a few things in nature stronger
and more agile than a jaguar.
As sleek and beautiful as they are lethal,
they’re the apex predator
of South America’s jungles and deserts.
Stealthy and fast, they kill by pouncing from behind
and piercing their prey’s skulls with jaws and teeth
capable of penetrating artillery shells.
Also, they’re the only animals that, when hunted,
will turn around and hunt their hunters.
Not really, but go with it.
It’s on brand for the cat.
Jaguars look arrogant as fuck and rightfully so.
The old logo and mark told that story.
The new logo says,
“We hired some MIT grads who, for $800,000,
told us to lay off everyone in our customer service department
and replace them with Salesforce’s agent force.”
Jaguar’s leaper now survives
only in a faint echo of the original,
the negative space in a field of horizontal lines
on a small side panel of the Type 00.
To take the greatest visual metaphor in automotive history
and kill it is to destroy shareholder value.
It’s the essence of CMO malpractice.
It’s just as stupid and wasteful
as if Disney responded to a spate of weak releases
by taking Mickey, Moana, Darth Vader,
and Elsa out and shooting them.
It’s also a rejection of everything
that ever made Jaguar, Jaguar.
Not just the grace and power of the animal,
but also the brand’s Britishness.
There’s nothing feline or rule Britannia about the Type 00.
And for all that talk about copying nothing,
the car’s silhouette is reminiscent
of the Rolls-Royce Spectre.
And its sharp edges and lines recall the Cybertruck.
The Jaguar people who signed off on all this
richly deserve to have their careers pounced on.
Branding is about differentiation
and creating a sense of scarcity.
That means leaning into whatever you have
that makes you stand out.
If you’re going bald, shave your head completely.
If you’re a tall woman, wear heels.
If you need glasses, get the biggest pair you can find.
Jaguar is abandoning its differentiators
while at the same time trying to enter
the high-end luxury market,
where being singular is the whole shooting match.
The higher you go in price, the more eccentric it gets.
In my view, Jaguar should not have spent a dollar
on marketing before it had an inspiring,
ready-to-ship product to show the public.
The companies that have added the most value
in the past 10 years barely advertise at all.
Netflix now has a market cap of about $400 billion.
In 2014, it was about $21 billion.
Alphabet’s market cap 10 years ago
was roughly $390 billion.
Today, it is $2.5 trillion.
Those companies and others took dollars out of advertising
and put them into making better products
and getting them to customers faster and cheaper
than their competitors.
Amazon didn’t win e-commerce with a marketing campaign.
It won by doing the hard work of guaranteeing
free delivery in 48 hours.
Others have won by going asset light.
NVIDIA uses suppliers for all of its manufacturing.
She-In, the fastest growing apparel company in the world,
has no stores and no warehouses.
It’s not too late for Jaguar to ditch its rebrand
and start all over again with a strategy
where a great product is not an afterthought
to a marketing campaign.
This is, in a way, an opportunity to announce
that after a huge outpouring of goodwill
toward the iconic metaphor,
they are going old coke and reverting.
However, we shouldn’t hold our breath.
The current landscape of reality TV stars
and misinformation has rid the corporate world
of one important and simple phrase.
We fucked up.
– Life is so rich.
– Support for this episode comes from AWS.
AWS Generative AI gives you the tools
to power your business forward
with the security and speed
of the world’s most experienced cloud.
(upbeat music)
Support for the show comes from HubSpot.
How do you begin to describe your job as a marketer?
You have to generate leads, create content, and gather data.
You’re spread way too thin, but HubSpot has a better way.
With the help of Breeze, HubSpot’s collection
of AI tools and features, like Content Remix,
turn one piece of content into a suite of assets,
pinpoint the best prospects, and level up your campaign’s
KPIs with a new analytic suite.
And most importantly, you’ll have a way easier time describing
your job at parties.
Visit hubspot.com/marketers to learn more.
Amazon Q Business is the generative AI assistant from AWS
because business can be slow, like wading through the mud.
But Amazon Q helps streamline work,
so tasks like summarizing monthly results
can be done in no time.
Learn when Amazon Q Business can do for you at aws.com/learnmore.
That’s aws.com/learnmore.
For over 30 years, XPRIZE has been the global leader
in designing and executing large-scale incentivized
competitions.
And through these competitions, they’ve accelerated solutions
to some of the world’s greatest challenges,
such as climate change, water scarcity, and healthy aging,
just to name a few.
XPRIZE is a catalyst for radical breakthroughs
that have impacted the lives of millions,
and they’re just getting started.
Through the power of incentivized competition,
XPRIZE can drive scientific discovery, cutting-edge
innovation, and groundbreaking solutions.
The future is still ours to create.
Head to XPRIZE.org to learn how you could help architect
a future of equitable abundance.
I’m Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice.
Jaguar is giving us more proof that the era of brands
is over, killing the cat, as read by George Hahn.
Jaguar, a brand that’s been in a coma for years,
is trying to wake up, and it’s gasping.
The car-free copy-nothing-kickoff video
and the rollout of a pink concept EV at Art Basel, Miami,
have inspired well-earned mockery.
The launch rivaled Elon’s WeRobot event
for the all-chip-no-sauce-of-product launch of 2024.
Getting attention is key to any marketing campaign,
so mission accomplished, sort of.
Tata Motors, which owns Jaguar and its stable-mate Land Rover,
has also succeeded in further eroding
what’s left of Jaguar’s brand equity.
Jaguar trashed its iconic logo, all its current models,
and its traditional promise of speed, power, and elegance.
In their place is an uninspired and generic brand mark,
a concept model that will never be put into production,
and an incomprehensible promise,
something about good-looking people,
bright colors, and exotic haircuts.
A lot has been said about this HBRK study
that’s writing itself,
including some predictable culture war bullshit
about Jaguar having gone woke.
Most of this misses the larger point,
which is that Jaguar’s move is further proof
that the brand age is over.
Just as doctors have a Hippocratic oath,
chief marketing officers ought to have a similar pledge.
First, do no harm.
I’ve advised lots of big consumer brands
about their marketing,
and I’ve noticed that CMOs recognize their days are numbered
and are desperate to show visible motion,
whether it makes sense or not.
Often that activity, devoid of progress,
means spending lots of money on a new agency
stocked with sharply dressed young people
who will host events giving awards
to whoever spent the most money
across the advertising industrial complex.
I’m honored to be part of this brand’s history,
and I’m shocked how well my predecessors
managed the brand, said no CMO ever.
The typical incoming speech?
Thank God I’m here, we need to redo everything.
Which is usually self-defeating.
For about 50 years following World War II,
it was good business to churn out a mediocre product
and then surround it with emotion, i.e. branding.
On any given night, about 60% of America
was in one of three places,
ABC, CBS, or NBC.
Via the miracle of TV advertising,
a few cents worth of peanut paste
could be transubstantiated into a jar of maternal love
as choosy mothers choose Jif.
In the age of the internet,
network television is in hospice.
Exhibit A, the proposed merger of Omnicom and Interpublic.
When I started Profit, a brand strategy consultancy,
these firms were the alphabets and metas of the economy.
Now they’re consolidating,
two emaciated polar bears fighting over fewer seals
and sharing a melting piece of ice.
The previous sentence is both awful and wonderful,
mostly the former.
Brands mean a lot less than they used to.
Consumers now have a range of weapons of mass diligence
to help them find and rate products,
starting with Google and social media.
I travel constantly, so I used to rely on well-known brands
when booking hotels in cities I didn’t know well.
The name Mandarin Oriental, or Four Seasons,
meant I could consistently expect and get
a seven or eight level customer experience.
Lately though, I’ve been using ChatGPT and other AI tools
to find nines that better fit the moment and me.
The gym at the Soho House Berlin,
the rooftop restaurant at the Waldorf in Beverly Hills,
the bar at Chiltern Firehouse.
If I sound like a privileged douchebag, trust your instincts.
The internet has diminished the power of even strong brands
and it’s penetrated the shield of good branding
from mediocre products like Nike, Intel, Target, et cetera.
A product or service that cannot fulfill its promise
to make you smarter or sexier can’t reverse its fortunes
by listening to Don Draper.
And inventing and refining a great product,
fixing its supply chain and improving your customer service
is a lot more work than turning to mid-journey
and asking for a new logo.
Jaguar’s problem for a long time has been products
that didn’t live up to the brand promise.
Well after its swinging London ’60s heyday,
Ford bought the company in 1989
and it’s now owned by India’s Tata.
It still manufactures the car in Coventry, UK,
thus technically preserving the Britishness
that’s key to its brand identity.
Although they’ve improved, the cars continue to be dogged
by a lingering reputation as mechanical nightmares.
Anybody who drove one was making the statement,
“I’m a gangster who probably owns two of these status symbols
because one is always in the shop.”
Style-wise, Jaguar’s current lineup has little of the illan
of the legendary E-type or other classic models.
In terms of sales in the premium car market,
Jaguar is an afterthought behind category leaders
BMW and Audi.
With a few exceptions,
Jaguar hasn’t been able to make anything
in the $50,000 plus price range that anybody wants to buy.
Jaguar’s current business response to this makes sense.
Management decided to wind the company down
and relaunch it.
Jaguar is ending production of its three current models
and retooling to produce an all-new, all-electric line.
It’s also decided to abandon the premium market
and go further upscale into luxury cars priced
at around $400,000.
This is a smaller market with fatter margins,
so the company is closing some dealerships.
All of which points to something that’s gone mostly
unremarked in the chatter about Jaguar’s rebrand.
Jaguar doesn’t see any growth selling
to lawyers and dentists,
but it does see a future selling
to entrepreneurs and financiers.
It’s going to be at least a year, however,
before any new era Jaguars go on sale.
No one outside the company knows how they will look
or what will be under the hood.
The clunky pink Type 00 sports tank Jaguar introduced
in Miami is a concept car.
It will never go into production.
I’ve been to a lot of car conventions
and seen a lot of concept cars.
In my view, they’re a waste of effort and money,
no matter how sexy.
They’re shiny, one-off marketing props.
Ivanka Trump is seriously more likely to be president
than the Tesla RoboVan is ever to be produced.
So with a dark year ahead of it
and no new product ready to show customers,
Jaguar decided to fix the one thing that wasn’t broken.
The new brand mark makes it seem Jaguar is relaunching
as an AI consulting firm.
The logo looks as if it was designed by AI
and never tested with real people.
According to one respondent to an entirely
unscientific survey I conducted on Instagram,
it, quote, would be a great logo for a kitchen knife set,
unquote.
One of the most precious things a company can possess
is a powerful logo, one that imprints itself on the eye
and instantly tells the brand story.
Humans are visually oriented.
Written language is only about 5,000 years old
and the printing press is less than 600 years old,
but visual communication via drawn or painted images
dates back to our Neanderthal ancestors.
That’s right, it may even predate our existence as a species.
We process visual information about 60,000 times faster
than we do words.
Researchers at MIT once estimated that the human brain
can correctly identify an image
in as little as 13 milliseconds.
When I talk about logos in my marketing class,
I demonstrate their power by asking students
if they can identify a mark using just their peripheral vision.
Great logos, the Nike Swoosh, the McDonald’s Arches,
the Mercedes three-pointed star,
are immediately recognizable even almost outside
our plane of vision.
An effective logo needs to be meaningful,
resonant, distinctive, and scalable.
Jaguar’s pouncing cat, which it called the leaper,
was all that.
There are a few things in nature stronger
and more agile than a jaguar.
As sleek and beautiful as they are lethal,
they’re the apex predator
of South America’s jungles and deserts.
Stealthy and fast, they kill by pouncing from behind
and piercing their prey’s skulls with jaws and teeth
capable of penetrating artillery shells.
Also, they’re the only animals that, when hunted,
will turn around and hunt their hunters.
Not really, but go with it.
It’s on brand for the cat.
Jaguars look arrogant as fuck and rightfully so.
The old logo and mark told that story.
The new logo says,
“We hired some MIT grads who, for $800,000,
told us to lay off everyone in our customer service department
and replace them with Salesforce’s agent force.”
Jaguar’s leaper now survives
only in a faint echo of the original,
the negative space in a field of horizontal lines
on a small side panel of the Type 00.
To take the greatest visual metaphor in automotive history
and kill it is to destroy shareholder value.
It’s the essence of CMO malpractice.
It’s just as stupid and wasteful
as if Disney responded to a spate of weak releases
by taking Mickey, Moana, Darth Vader,
and Elsa out and shooting them.
It’s also a rejection of everything
that ever made Jaguar, Jaguar.
Not just the grace and power of the animal,
but also the brand’s Britishness.
There’s nothing feline or rule Britannia about the Type 00.
And for all that talk about copying nothing,
the car’s silhouette is reminiscent
of the Rolls-Royce Spectre.
And its sharp edges and lines recall the Cybertruck.
The Jaguar people who signed off on all this
richly deserve to have their careers pounced on.
Branding is about differentiation
and creating a sense of scarcity.
That means leaning into whatever you have
that makes you stand out.
If you’re going bald, shave your head completely.
If you’re a tall woman, wear heels.
If you need glasses, get the biggest pair you can find.
Jaguar is abandoning its differentiators
while at the same time trying to enter
the high-end luxury market,
where being singular is the whole shooting match.
The higher you go in price, the more eccentric it gets.
In my view, Jaguar should not have spent a dollar
on marketing before it had an inspiring,
ready-to-ship product to show the public.
The companies that have added the most value
in the past 10 years barely advertise at all.
Netflix now has a market cap of about $400 billion.
In 2014, it was about $21 billion.
Alphabet’s market cap 10 years ago
was roughly $390 billion.
Today, it is $2.5 trillion.
Those companies and others took dollars out of advertising
and put them into making better products
and getting them to customers faster and cheaper
than their competitors.
Amazon didn’t win e-commerce with a marketing campaign.
It won by doing the hard work of guaranteeing
free delivery in 48 hours.
Others have won by going asset light.
NVIDIA uses suppliers for all of its manufacturing.
She-In, the fastest growing apparel company in the world,
has no stores and no warehouses.
It’s not too late for Jaguar to ditch its rebrand
and start all over again with a strategy
where a great product is not an afterthought
to a marketing campaign.
This is, in a way, an opportunity to announce
that after a huge outpouring of goodwill
toward the iconic metaphor,
they are going old coke and reverting.
However, we shouldn’t hold our breath.
The current landscape of reality TV stars
and misinformation has rid the corporate world
of one important and simple phrase.
We fucked up.
– Life is so rich.
– Support for this episode comes from AWS.
AWS Generative AI gives you the tools
to power your business forward
with the security and speed
of the world’s most experienced cloud.
(upbeat music)
As read by George Hahn.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
