WHEN did adverts stop trying to sell us stuff and start telling us how to think?
The uproar this week over the rebranding of an iconic British car firm is just the latest example of a bid to shove “progressive” and “woke” ideology down our throats — and the British public have had enough.
Jaguar, in its infinite wisdom, is relaunching the classic brand for the 21st Century, doing away with the legendary leaping jaguar logo and showcasing a bizarre new advert featuring an array of androgynous characters, dressed in bizarre, brightly coloured plastic outfits marching around like a miserable box of Quality Street who’ve accidentally wandered on to the set of the Hunger Games.
Meanwhile, the advert instructs us to “live vivid”, “delete ordinary”, “break moulds” and “copy nothing”.
You’d be hard pressed to know this was a commercial for Jaguar, or indeed any car brand, given that no actual CAR is anywhere to be seen.
Even Tesla mogul Elon Musk was moved to ask on X/Twitter: “Do you sell cars?”
Frankly, I’ve seen better adverts from the losing team on The Apprentice.
If Lord Sugar was in charge, the team behind this rebrand (800 of them, I kid you not) would ALL have been fired.
And the late John “Two Jags” Prescott would have been horrified that his beloved brand had been transformed out of all recognition.
A whole new breed of business leaders no longer judge themselves by how much money they make but by their virtue-signalling for the latest progressive cause
Julia
So what on Earth is it all about?
There’s nothing wrong with Jaguar wanting to rebrand itself for a younger market than the Inspector Morse fans, but who precisely does it think this advert will appeal to?
And why do so many major companies (and their PR firms and ad agencies) think that it’s their job to indoctrinate us rather than just, y’know, SELL US STUFF?
The answer lies in another big business — the DEI industry.
DEI stands for Diversity, Equality and Inclusivity, and this is a sector that has captured the hearts and minds of most of the Western corporate world.
A whole new breed of business leaders no longer judge themselves by how much money they make but by their virtue- signalling for the latest progressive cause.
It’s no surprise, then, that Adrian Mardell, CEO of Jaguar’s parent company JLR, is fully signed up to the DEI cause, pushing “LGBTQ+ rights” at every opportunity and beaming at Pride marches and awards ceremonies praising his woke “allyship”.
I suspect that Jaguar will be just the latest firm to discover that this tiresome self-righteous finger-wagging comes with a cost, as brands who push this agenda are getting a backlash from customers who tell them: “Go woke, go broke”.
Bud Light, once America’s top-selling beer, saw shares in its parent company plunge by 11 per cent in spring 2023 after recruiting trans online influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a man who identifies as a girl, to promote its product.
Sports giant Nike also faced a huge backlash from female customers after featuring Mulvaney — a man with no breasts — in a sports bra.
And Disney’s foray into progressive messaging and diversity-obsessed casting at the expense of actually entertaining audiences saw four major movies in a row bomb at the box office, despite them costing a total of almost $1billion to make.
Meanwhile, an ad for Gillette razors chiding men for their toxic masculinity did not go down well with their male customers, funnily enough, while Costa Coffee earned a boycott for promoting trans ideology.
Even Wickes, the home improvement retailer, faced a backlash after a company chief said women’s rights activists were anti-trans “bigots” and not “welcomed in our stores” — causing Wickes’ share price to fall by five per cent.
Jaguar would be wise to pay attention to its critics because most customers have had enough of woke.
We’re tired of rainbow lanyards, non-stop Pride months, non-binary uniforms and preferred pronoun name badges.
We are fed up with companies lecturing those who ultimately pay their wages on how we should think, speak and behave.
Whether we’re buying a car, a beer or a coffee, we don’t want a sneering moral lecture from the people selling it.
If you don’t want to go broke, then drop the woke.
ONE of the few sights that genuinely cheered many of us up during the misery of Covid lockdowns was the sight of Captain (later Sir) Tom Moore, aged 99, slowly walking 100 laps of his garden to raise money for charity.
Now a Charity Commission report into a fund set up in Capt Tom’s name after his death has revealed a shocking betrayal by the late war veteran’s own daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore and her husband Colin, who pocketed £1.5miliion of cash to fund their own lavish lifestyle, including a new spa and pool block at their house.
It defies belief that any child would betray the legacy of their own father like this.
But while her name is in the gutter where it belongs, Capt Tom’s good name will live on forever.
FROM my very first job delivering a weekly evening paper to working in a burger shop, pubs, restaurants and offices, right up to my first newspaper job, I can remember everywhere I’ve worked and exactly what my job was.
And so can you. Which is why it’s so peculiar that the Chancellor is so confused about her past.
Rachel Reeves’ CV is the Bermuda Triangle of former employment, prompting far more questions than answers.
Time and again, Labour have trumpeted Ms Reeves’ track record as an economist, and yet now we learn that half the time she worked in admin, while she doesn’t even know if she won a kids’ chess championship or not (she didn’t).
Is it any wonder that a Chancellor who is so forgetful about her own jobs should care so little in her Budget about protecting everyone else’s?
