Feedback on Jaguar's new campaign was awful: understand why this might be good

Jaguar presented a hugely controversial rebrand campaign to massive public commotion in mid november – which in internet time can seem like eons ago. But that can afford us the perspective to analyze the results with less heated emotions – and the necessary data to properly run our AltaVox tools over the resulting debate!

So the first thing we need to ask ourselves is: was it all that bad? And the answer is yes. The "Copy Nothing" video has amassed almost 3.2 million views so far, with over 43k comments. And they were, indeed, almost unanimously negative according to our analysis, mostly bashing the rebranding effort and brand strategy (89%). So the remaining 11% were positive, right? If only... Our tool shows that the rest of the comments were mostly gibberish, a common phenomenon on highly controversial videos like this.

"Jaguar | Copy Nothing" analysis made on 12/08/2024

So this was surely a miss, right? Well, to answer that we might need to dig a bit deeper. One of the most common complaints on the initial rebranding video was the absence of actual cars in it. So a week later, Jaguar followed up with another video titled "Jaguar Type 00 | Copy Nothing Miami" where they finally revealed their new model. With considerably fewer views (303k so far), this piece of content sparked nonetheless another round of heated conversation with over 4k comments. Most were again negative, sure, with 71.5% still quite unhappy with Jaguar's marketing strategy and the new look. But, 11% of voices praised the courage of such a movement and the futuristic appeal of the new design – which, as they say, is something, right? Well, it's more than just something actually...

"Jaguar Type 00 | Copy Nothing Miami" analysis made on 12/08/2024

Gone are the days when positive reception was the main success metric for judging the effectiveness of an online awareness campaign. Nowadays, especially with the rise of "absurd marketing", brands and influencers sometimes aim for the highest impact possible, be it good or bad, hoping that the residual positive results are bigger than they'd be with a more orthodox strategy – and they usually are. And that's what the numbers show us in Jaguar's case if we look closely.

Before the infamous rebrand video, Jaguar's last post on their channel was a pretty classic one, about a year ago, showcasing an aggressive looking racing car, much in line with what "old timers" seem to supposedly be missing now. But its results were meager: only 23k views and 99 comments, with most of them on the positive side (73.4%). But wait before looking back too fondly on the good old days: in absolute numbers, we're talking about 72 positive comments, versus 443 on the Jaguar Type 00 video – so even amid the huge backlash, the recent campaign achieved 515% better results.

"Jaguar TCS Racing | 2023/24 Jaguar I-TYPE 6 Livery Revealed"

Of course, numbers on a spreadsheet can tell you anything if you squeeze them hard enough and only time will tell if Jaguar's move was successful or not. But this is a great example of how sentiment analysis can give you a greater understanding of the actual results of large-scale online campaigns.

And yes, making sense of thousands, sometimes millions of comments can be quite tricky and overwhelming. But with AltaVox it's not. If you're interested in a demo session, reach out to us at contact@altavox.ai.