Woke it may be, but Jaguar’s ‘Copy Nothing’ video is a work of marketing genius. With its ungendered models, ungrammatical slogans (‘live vivid’, ‘delete ordinary’) and strange absence of cars, the 30-second ad has brought global attention to a brand that was dying for want of a new generation of customers, in an auto industry in turmoil over its stalled transition from carbon fuel to battery power. And a week later comes the reveal in Miami of the futuristic Type 00 electric concept car that the fuss was really about.
Love it or hate it, the dictum of founder Sir William Lyons that inspired the video’s title, ‘a Jaguar should be a copy of nothing’, has certainly been fulfilled by this bold shedding of heritage, which even replaces the ‘growler’ grille badge with something more like a barcode. But still the E-Type last built half a century ago remains the petrolhead’s dream; and Inspector Morse’s maroon Mark 2 will forever find corpses on afternoon television. Fascinating as it was to learn from Sir John Hegarty – the advertising guru who transformed Audi’s fortunes in the 1980s – on the Today programme about the sinuous art of rebranding, Jaguar’s heritage is safely stored in our collective memory. How sad that we could no longer also hear from Lord ‘Two Jags’ Prescott, late leader of the marque’s lost tribe.
Live dismal
It can’t be long before some online wag produces a spoof rebranding video for the Labour cabinet, looking miserable in red jumpsuits under slogans such as ‘live dismal’ and ‘delete promise’. Their negative impact so far on business and consumer confidence – sine qua non for the economic growth the Prime Minister so often claims as his ‘number one priority’ – is nothing short of remarkable.
The Institute of Directors says investment and employment plans among 600 of its smaller–company members are at their weakest since the lockdown days of May 2020; and that as business leaders faced the impacts of the recent Budget, optimism fell from a measure of minus 52 in October to minus 65 in November. Meanwhile, despite the Black Friday advertising blitz, in-store retail sales for November were down 5.5 per cent year on year according to the accountants BDO, while online sales were down 7.8 per cent – all in all, the worst figures since January 2021.
Surprisingly, the CBI chairman Rupert Soames says his large-corporate members still feel a sense of relief at the prospect of a relatively stable Labour full-term in contrast to the ‘chaotic’ Conservative years. It’s true that the Starmer concept car for a new kind of ‘pro-business, pro-growth, pro-worker’ Labour government roared past the broken-down Tory jalopy on the grid.
But if you’ll forgive an overworked metaphor, it has veered straight into a brick wall on the first lap. And if neither the driver nor the pit mechanics understand the fundamental design fault that is Labour’s hostility to enterprise and wealth creation, no amount of cosmetic rebadging (or cabinet reshuffling) will put it back on the track.
Not so festive
Is a lively mergers and acquisitions market a sign of underlying economic resurgence – or the reverse? Data from Dealogic tells us that M&A deals involving UK companies so far this year amount to more than £240 billion, 57 per cent up on the same period last year and far ahead of France and Germany at £112 billion each. If they’re both in deep economic trouble, then we must be relatively robust – or so you might think from a Financial Times headline, ‘Rush of deals brightens UK market spirits’.
Not so, I fear. Aviva’s £3.3 billion bid for Direct Line follows a halving of the latter’s share price driven by mayhem in the motor insurance sector – and threatens major job losses. If the Australian infrastructure financier Macquarie is willing to offer £700 million for Renewi, a FTSE 250-listed waste management group, the shrewd Aussies must think it’s badly undervalued by the public market, which means UK pension funds have overlooked it. Likewise the auto parts maker TI Fluid Systems, which will also lose its London listing as it falls to a £1 billion Canadian offer.
All this is very far from the two-plus-two-makes-five positivity of boomtime takeover action. Today’s picture is of foreign bargain-hunters prowling a weak and shrinking UK equity market while domestic merger partners seek economies of scale in the face of soaring labour costs and consumer gloom. The only Christmas spirits brightened by an upsurge in M&A in these conditions are those of the fee-hunting bankers, lawyers and PRs on either side of every deal.
Seat in the sky
The jagged cluster of towers that defines today’s City skyline is, according to taste, an abomination of over-development or – as seen through misty eyes from The Spectator’s ‘claret, clays and cognac’ river cruise – a living sculpture of economic renewal. Either way, it’s with us to stay and there’s no point yearning for a lost past, particularly since Shravan Joshi, the City Corporation’s chair of planning, told me last year that he needs at least five more skyscrapers to accommodate incoming and expanding insurers, lawyers and tech firms over the next decade. And the next one off the drawing board, 1 Undershaft, promises to be as controversial as any.
As tall as the Shard (which is the maximum height allowed by the Civil Aviation Authority) but blockier in design and looming massively above the 15th-century church of St Andrew Undershaft, this scheme includes an 11th-floor overhanging ‘sky garden’ with a curved front edge and a big hole in the middle. The architects might want to revisit that idea before it’s too late: squeezed as it is between ‘the Gherkin’ in St Mary Axe and ‘the Cheesegrater’ on Leadenhall Street, their proposal has already been nicknamed ‘the Toilet Seat’.
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