Jaguar - it's not a rebrand; it's a mid-life crisis.

I wasn’t going to bother commenting on the Jaguar skin-shedding, because far more astute and exalted brains than mine have applied themselves to it, and everyone's already sick of talking about it.

That is, until the Jaguar directors began attacking those who mourned the loss of the old brand.

If they've made a mistake, I believe it’s here.

The top cat at Jaguar - I forget his name, but then I expect we all will soon - hit out at what he called "vile hatred and intolerance".

But is it hatred? Or just a dashed and dispirited love? A brand that many of us felt evoked a spirit of adventure, power and breathtaking style reduced to a camp, derivative catwalk mashup of Star Trek, Teletubbies and Boney M.

If you wanted to build a brand like that - and I don’t doubt that you passionately believe the world needs it - why on earth would you choose Jaguar as a jumping-off point?

It’s like Vivienne Westwood marching into Barbour with a blowtorch. She may be brilliant, but Vivienne - take some Canesten and cool your jets. Please.

The mistake many brand owners make is in thinking that brand owners own their brand - when in fact it exists only in their customers’ heads. In Jaguar's case, you're the current custodians of a 90 year old brand that we in Britain are collectively proud of.

The key thing all this anger reveals - and Jaguar are blinkered to - is that they had a brand that was loved.

Truly loved. So loved that many people have spent days fulminating over it.

And yet over the years, Jaguar failed to turn that love into sales, because they just couldn’t build a car that matched up to that level of love.

That was the crux of the problem - not that there weren’t enough Chat GPT mousemat motivators or yellow rubber rings in their advertising.

And now they’re saying they’re going to p*** in the warm bed they’ve been in for decades because the love has not been consummated in recent years.

“It’s not my fault, Darling - it’s yours.”

So let’s be clear what you're saying, Jaguar. Rather than do the washing up, talk to your loved one, and fix the problems in the relationship, you’ve spent a fortune on a comb-over and Turkey teeth, bought a gold jacket and popped out to the local disco in the hope of finding someone new to sleep with you?

This is not a rebrand - it's a midlife crisis.

But back to the point - that’s a famously tough marketing challenge. If you want to find new customers, the first place to look is your current customers.

What is it they love about you?

What don’t they love?

What could you do to make them love you more?

And then how do you find more of them?

What you don’t generally do is give them the middle finger and say “we don’t need you because we’re off to find new people who are going love us”.

If it were that simple, there would be no marketing courses or advertising agencies.

And I haven’t seen anything in this brand execution to send a shiver through those who currently sell to High Net Worth customers. (Note: Heritage is quite a big motivator for HNW buyers.)

Starting afresh with a new, untried product and a new brand, when everyone knows you’ve simply pulled the curtain on years of unreliable engineering and you’re popping up in a brave new world that’s churning out cheap, smart, reliable cars - with nothing more than an avant-garde haircut and a rubber ring round your waist, and charging ten times the price of the little Chinese wunderkarts - is of course raising an eyebrow.

Think about it. You’ve just elbowed your way into a crowded, jostling world where everyone is three inches tall.

And yet you’re one of the few who can lift themselves above the crowd by saying:

“We’ve famously given the world some of the most exciting, impressive and breathtakingly beautiful cars ever made”

….so why on earth wouldn’t you?

And when those who loved your brand show you what love they had - all you ever had to do was build the cars that met their expectations - why would you call them dinosaurs? Why tell them their passion to defend the brand they love is because they’re homophobic, racist gammons? It's just lazy thinking to dismiss all over 40s as Nazis. Most of us grew up laying a place for everyone at the table, and allowing no-one to feel unwelcome in our homes. Those values are part of British heritage, too.

But the need to show inclusivity and solidarity with gay people doesn’t mean nobody wants to see a growler.

We get it. You say you’re into diversity now.

Except what you’re showing the world is not diversity. It’s a very narrow, exclusive (and pretty weird looking) niche. Maybe some who can afford to splash ￡150k on a car see themselves represented in this ad. Maybe they can’t. I don’t know because I haven’t seen the research. But I’ve been in this business long enough to know that Bentley, Maserati, Ferrari et al won’t be smacking their foreheads at your target segmentation.

It takes quite a degree of arrogance to do this. To say, "My vision eclipses everything that's gone before and all thinking before mine is worthless". But arrogance is only forgivable when it's a front for genius. So what's behind the brag and bluster of 'copy nothing'?

While the F-Type is a passable budget Aston Martin, the rest of the models would struggle to stand out in a lineup of middle-manager saloons.

If you were capable of building the car that would merit all this fuss, Jaguar, why haven't you done it already?

But what I have seen in recent days is the global passion for a brand which Jaguar never thought to tap.

If you needed to sell more cars, would that not have been a good place to start?