How Jaguar Land Rover Can Build its Corporate Brand

Sometime last year, I had shared my thoughts and ideas on how corporate brands can enable renewal, and in that context, I had shared my thoughts on a corporate branding strategy for Jaguar Land Rover in a blog post.

An important part of that branding strategy was to bring together Jaguar and Land Rover as a single corporate entity with a new vision for the future, since their corporate website had stated the new vision for the company. The vision has to do with creating the future of mobility, and the objective of the corporate branding strategy for JLR was therefore, to align the core brand values of the two brands with what the values of the new company should be and also to tie in these with the parent brand, Tata Motors, as well as the Tata Group.

Usually, when a company undertakes such an exercise, it is a good time to communicate the new vision and the new corporate brand to customers, as well as all stakeholders. To this extent, I have now taken the corporate brand strategy to the next stage, which is to create the brand communication campaign for the new company, Jaguar Land Rover.

Since the corporate vision is to create the future of mobility, the campaign’s objective is to communicate the new brand positioning of Jaguar Land Rover to customers, opinion makers and governments in all their key markets. In the brand strategy document that I had shared earlier, I had recommended that they restate Destination Zero as Arrive Future Perfect and therefore, the campaign I am about to share now uses Arrive Future Perfect as the tagline for JLR, as that is how the corporate brand ought to be positioned.

The campaign uses TV as well as print in select media channels, in their important markets and needs to be amplified through PR as well as direct marketing, based on the same brand communication strategy.

The creative idea is to present the future of mobility in ways that the luxury customer can easily relate to, while creating the luxury sports classic positioning and brand image for JLR. You can read the JLR corporate brand campaign document by clicking the link below. It features the communication strategy, the television commercial scripts as well as the text of the print campaign.

The three TV commercials you can view below use the themes of treating the earth as one’s playground, developing a new motoring language, and road travel a la luxury air travel. I have made them just using whatever stock footage I could find on JLR’s own corporate website as well as free stock footage sites and the music too is just to give you an idea of what I mean by classical with a contemporary touch.

In the five-advert print campaign shared below, we get a chance to share more information, providing the rationale for the new positioning of Jaguar Land Rover. We explore similar themes as in the TV commercials, but with additional information such as JLR’s £ 150 million investment in the National Automotive Innovation Centre at Coventry, JLR’s next-generation electrical architecture, SOTA (software-over-the-air technology) which helps deliver updates and advanced driver assistance systems, all of which persuade the customer that JLR is best equipped to take us into the future world of mobility. I am not a designer, but the watermark backgrounds in my print campaign layouts are actually meant to be of high-tech engineering/CAD drawings of JLR vehicles and their systems. There is no particular vehicle featured separately in any of the adverts, as this is a corporate brand campaign.

I have been writing recently on the relationship that corporate brands have with their individual product brands. Therefore, there is a need to keep the brands connected. You might have noticed that in the corporate brand campaign I have tried to hint strongly at the worlds of Jaguar and Land Rover; one through the sportiness and the connection with air travel (Jaguar as the jet-age commute) and the other through the ability to go anywhere and beyond (Land Rover’s above and beyond brand positioning).

While the adverts mention Pivotal, JLR’s new mobility subscription service just launched in the UK, my recommendation to JLR would be to rebrand it as Zephyr or Spry as I had shared in my strategy document. I also think that rather than a subscription service that is akin to car rentals, Pivotal should aim to be a full-fledged mobility hailing service through an app, where customers take on subscriptions based on vehicle type and distance travelled. It should really attempt to be as close to air travel as possible in terms of quality of service and luxury.

JLR’s website also mentions a Project Vector which appears to be the design and development of a new electric urban rapid transport system. It might even be autonomous in the future, like Masdar city’s pod cars and shuttle service. I would recommend that JLR focus on its future luxury vehicles and services, while Tata Motors takes on the mantle of developing Project Vector and leads it. They can do this in partnership with JLR and TCS, a technology company that is also part of the Tata Group. And they needn’t wait for the Indian government to formulate its policy on electric and shared urban rapid transport; they can develop this at an international level in the UK or US and bring it to India later.

Besides, as I have written before, JLR and Tata Motors will have to make a strategic decision soon: to continue to make vehicles or manage the mobility service. If Pivotal (Zephyr/Spry) gains traction, it might have to be spun off as a separate company under JLR. And similarly, if Tata Motors ever goes into the business of not just designing vehicles like the ones being developed in Project Vector, but actually managing urban transport systems, it too will have to hive off that part of the business as a separate company. In any case, we are facing a world with fewer cars on the streets, if Future Perfect vision ever comes to fruition.

Recent news of car sales improving across the world, including in India, is a good sign, though I suspect much of it is in response to the pandemic. At any rate the world needs to be ready for the future of mobility, as the car industry is being disrupted from within by the likes of Tesla, as well as from without by tech giants like Google and Apple. General Motors recently announced a partnership with Microsoft and it is not uncommon now to see car manufacturers at the annual consumer electronics shindig, CES, in the US.

What an exciting future awaits us in road travel! Here’s hoping Jaguar Land Rover will arrive future perfect.

The stock footage for the three JLR corporate films are from JLR’s own website, Pexels.com and Videvo, while the stock music is Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons from Archive.org and the bass and drums layers are from Free Music Archive. The stock images for the print campaign are from Unsplash, JLR’s own website and from Pixabay. I am grateful to all of them.