Jeremiah Clarkson: Jaguar Competing Against Bentley?

Hello pips, Jeremiah here. Down the tipple, oh well, jolly gosh, what have we here? what’s going on with Jaguar cars? Apparently, company bosses want to hide the elephant in a rather small room. They are switching to a luxury bespoke business model because they couldn’t quite get their heads around the mass market business model. In the state Jaguar is in right now, you have to ask if Jaguar bosses could even get together and make an Airfix model… of a Jaguar. Jaguar is in decline and has been for near on 20 years now. The company lives in a continual state of denial. The glory days of the 1960s and late 1970s are long gone, nothing can stop the walls from closing in.

Pen in hand, paper notebook ready, the British media props up Jaguar’s fantasy about establishing a 4th automotive Reich. Jaguar can buy the media to drink their kool-aid and pay the media to publish puff pieces, but the buying public isn’t buying it. Not with the same clamor they do for Audi, BMW or Mercedes.

At the start of the 21st Century, Jaguar tried to be Jaguar. It failed. Then Jaguar tried to become Britain’s answer to Germany’s automotive Reich. It failed. Even the jellied-eye-eating, flag-waving, buy-British at-any-cost bigots opted for the Toyota Corolla. The Toyota Corolla, boredom on four wheels, was better than buying a Jaguar… any Jaguar. After decades of billion-dollar investment, Jaguar finds itself in a downward spiral of its own making.

The company is losing money, customers, and business. It’s very simple. For example, fewer and fewer people are buying a brand new Jaguar. So company bosses have decided to use the nuclear option and just obligate as much as they can with the hope they can turn the few remaining Jaguar brand molecules into some sort of low-volume luxury bespoke supernova where they can give a few rich fascists the option of not buying a Bentley for the same price.

What the media isn’t addressing is the rather large elephant trying not to vacate the room. Switching from a mass-market brand to a lower-volume luxury bespoke brand can only have a few negative outcomes. Job cuts, mass redundancies, betrayal.