In November 2024, Jaguar released a 30-second video to herald the biggest transformation in its 102-year history. The film featured androgynous models in kaleidoscopic outfits, slogans such as delete ordinary and live vivid, and not a single car. Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla (amongst much else), responded on X with a simple question: Do you sell cars? Within days the brand’s positive sentiment had collapsed from 23 per cent to eight per cent, according to CARMA, a media-intelligence firm. The chief executive stepped down a few months later. Having spent years reinventing itself as an electric ultra-luxury brand, what it had not done was think hard enough about how to tell people.
If we’re being honest, Jaguar is something of an extreme case, although the underlying failure is all too common. The corporate world has developed a considerable body of thinking on how to do reinvention and a remarkably thin one on how to communicate it.
The costs associated with such omissions can be big. In 2009, Tropicana, a juice brand then owned by PepsiCo with annual revenues in excess of 700 million US dollars, redesigned the packaging for its flagship orange juice. Gone was the iconic orange-with-a-straw, replaced instead with a generic glass of yellow liquid. Shoppers could not find the product on supermarket shelves. Within two months sales had fallen by a fifth. The old carton came back shortly after.
The rewards for getting it right are just as big. Ørsted, a Danish energy company, pulled off one of the most admired corporate reinventions of the past decade. Originally called DONG Energy (an acronym for Danish Oil and Natural Gas), the firm divested its fossil-fuel assets, closed its coal plants and became the world’s largest developer of offshore wind. Only then, in November 2017, did it change its name, honouring Hans Christian Ørsted, a 19th-century Danish scientist who discovered electromagnetism. Henrik Poulsen, then chief executive, framed the name change around a vision, “a world that runs entirely on green energy”, that the company’s stakeholders already supported. Investors bought in. A thesis from Copenhagen Business School concluded that the firm had successfully built a new identity with “Danish, green and responsible connotations.”
What separates Ørsted from Jaguar is sequencing. Ørsted communicated its reinvention after the evidence was in. Jaguar asked the world to do little more than, in contemporary parlance, trust the vibes. As Brand Vision, a consultancy, noted, the most controversial element of the Jaguar launch was not the typography or the models but the rollout itself, an identity-first story where the audience expected a product-first one.
Inside out
One dimension of reinvention communication that rarely gets the attention it deserves is the internal one. Research in the Journal of Business Research found that internal branding during a corporate rebrand is critical to its success, given that employees who do not understand changes to the corporate brand are unlikely to enact the brand promise to customers.
Bridging the Reinvention Gap
Staff, in other words, are the first audience, not the last. A reinvention announced to the Financial Times before it has been explained to the people who answer the phones begins with a mistake. Employees who learn from LinkedIn that their company has a new name tend not to become enthusiastic ambassadors for it. Good transformations brief staff weeks before the external launch, equip client-facing teams with answers to inevitable questions, and treat internal communication as a genuine exercise in persuasion.
Proof, then promise
The deeper question is what reinvention communication is actually for. A press release announces a fact, but proper communication builds a narrative that answers three questions the audience will have whether you address them or not: Why are you changing? What will be different? Why should I care? Ørsted answered all three before it changed anything. Jaguar, arguably, answered none.
Rawdon Glover, Jaguar’s managing director, said the brand was “fine with polarising.” Polarisation is a legitimate strategy in fashion or music. For a company that needs to persuade buyers to part with 100,000 UK pounds for an electric car, it is a gamble. The rebrand generated a 1,300 per cent increase in brand readership and nearly a billion PR impressions. It also generated memes comparing the new logo to a wellness app. There is, it would appear, such a thing as bad publicity.
Reinvention communication done well is a sequence, not an event. It begins inside the organisation, moves to close stakeholders (investors, major clients, partners) and reaches the public only when the narrative is supported by evidence. Different audiences need different things. Staff need clarity and reassurance, investors need a commercial rationale, and customers need a reason to stay or switch.
Companies that get this right share a few instincts. They lead with proof rather than promise, they treat communication as a strategic function, they resist the urge to reveal everything at once. And they remember that the people closest to the business (employees, long-standing customers, suppliers) deserve to hear about a transformation before they read about it on social media. A reinvention that nobody understands has not, in any meaningful sense, happened.
Photo: Dreamstime.
