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Stephen Semple:
Hey Matt, we’re going to do something a little different on this one.

Matthew Burns:
Well, you started so I’m assuming so.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. So it’s a little bit of a rant of mine. As you know, it’s about branding. I came across this article, so Jaguar, as we know, went through a rebrand, but we’re going to actually talk about what actually branding is, but they went through one and we will show this ad. This ad was a terrible failure, but there’s lessons to be learned from this. So let’s play the ad and I’ll tell you the response of the ad, how well it did.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah, that’s the Jaguar new brand ad.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. So global sales following this ad went from 61,661 vehicles in 2022 to two years later to 33,320. Just shy of a 50% decline.

Matthew Burns:
Oh man, that hurts.

Stephen Semple:
But here’s the problem. People, including people in advertising agencies, our competitors are f******* stupid. Yes. We’ll have to bleep that. And I’m going to point out why. Sue Benson, so we’re going to take heat on this. I’m calling somebody out. Sue Benson, founder and CEO of the Behaviors Agency, lists some of the reasons why she feels the new approach failed. There’s a quote from her that appeared in Creative Boom. “There are few, if any, cars in the ad, which leaves the audience unsure what the brand even stands for.”

Matthew Burns:
Oh, man.

Stephen Semple:
Now, I want you to run this next ad, which we know Apple ran. And this was the ad that Steve Jobs ran when he came back to Apple. And Apple was like weeks away from bankruptcy and this ad saved them. Can you please run the ad?

Narrator: Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them about the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Matthew Burns:
Brilliant. We all know this ad, this ad moved mountains.

Stephen Semple:
But hold on a second. Few if any. I’m just going to change the word here. There are a few, if any, computers in the ad which leaves the audience unsure what the brand even stands for. Really? That’s the problem. There wasn’t cars in the Jaguar ad. I want to point out, there were no computers in that Apple ad.

Matthew Burns:
No, none. Zero.

Stephen Semple:
This is what drives me nuts with branding. Branding is not a logo. Branding is an emotion. The Apple ad was aspirational and self-identification. Yeah, I too want to be one of them. And I too am a little bit of a rebel. And especially when Apple ran that ad and Apple was an outsider, Apple was not the big brand it is today. It allowed us all to emotionally connect to Apple and go, I’m like them. That’s what branding is. The Jaguar ad could have worked if they made it aspirational.

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely.

Stephen Semple:
But it was just a bunch of blah.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. It’s standard sayings that everybody wants to say and be known for nothing. Not one statement, but a whole bunch of random statements try to push together in a really weird and colorful way.

Stephen Semple:
Branding is about emotion. Look, there’s two ways you can promote a business. You can either promote the business on features and benefits, which is what Sue Benson wants you to do. Show the car. Or you can build it through creating emotional bonds. It’s about how somebody feels. And branding is about how somebody feels. And yes, branding’s not just your ad and not just your logo. Branding is the sum total of all the things you do that create an emotion about your business.

And then branding is the act of anchoring all of those emotions around a logo. So when you see the Apple logo, all of your emotions about Apple come back, cause it has actually anchored those emotions. The Jaguar ad didn’t fail because there’s no car in it. I’m sorry. We can find lots of ads that don’t show the product that have been highly successful.

Matthew Burns:
And that specific ad was called Copy Nothing – was the name of the ad. Copy Nothing, which doesn’t really even say anything. And when you think about it, when you’re buying a Jaguar, depending on at any given moment how many models they have at any given time, there’s not a ton of models to choose from. So all these people are still going to be driving a very similar vehicle. I don’t know how those two things went together. And this is what I’m saying, it’s got to speak to the population. And what I do know is that they alienated their existing customer base.

Stephen Semple:
Yes. Now I’m going to say that I also think there’s a couple of things and I’m now going to come back… Sue Benson later went on to say, emotion has suffered too. Rather than stirring pride or aspiration, the new identity feels cold and aloof. I don’t know whether I completely agree with that emotional disconnect, but there was an emotional disconnect.

If I had been doing Jaguar’s advertising, what Jaguar had always been known for was being an artistic looking vehicle. So there’s two things I would do if I was running Jaguar today. One is I’d be starting to make their cars look a little bit more artistic. I would put some little bit of design element into them and I would lean into that history. I think the other problem that Jaguar is struggling with is Jaguar does not look much different than any other vehicle on the road today. And I don’t know if their advertising will fix that for Jaguar.

Matthew Burns:
Oh, interesting. And that’s a good point actually. I mean, it’s kind of what we would do when we would take a client in for a bold idea day. We would try to figure out what it is that they’re actually doing that’s different than everybody else in the market. And then we would shine a big heavy light on what they’re doing different so that they could be known for something themselves versus being one of, because we stand very much against one of marketing. I mean the rebrand for them was awkward. It was a complete departure from where they were at. It didn’t really stand for anything. And it’s unfortunate because you’ve got a lot of our industry peers who didn’t see the actual problem. Because the problem wasn’t that they didn’t have a car in the ad, they just did a shitty job telling the emotional story.

Stephen Semple:
They built no emotional connection.

Matthew Burns:
So I completely agree with you and sorry Sue, I’m a very apologetic human and I’m sorry Sue, that we’re picking on you. But quite frankly, you’re not alone. There’s more than one person that felt the exact same way. And if they had just leaned into the car and shown exactly how fast it can go and that they’ve got 14 jets instead of 3 jets for air conditioning, that would’ve been the thing that would’ve got us to buy more Jaguars. And it’s not, it’s never going to be, it never has been the reason why people buy things. Yeah, man. I’m now at a loss.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. But we’ve seen this over and over again. So this is the whole thing. You’ve got to make a choice, and this is the choice that sits in front of you as an advertiser, is you have to either choose to build your ads around features and benefits and then you better hope that your features and benefits are different than everybody else’s. Otherwise you’re now a me too. So that’s the reason why most businesses can’t do it. They actually don’t have anything super differentiating

Or you’ve got to make it around emotional connection. The reason why we’ve called this Sticky Sales Stories is the best way to build emotional connection is to tell a story. The Apple “think different” was a story. There was a story in there, there was a connection in there. It was aspirational connection, all that other stuff. That’s what makes a brand powerful. And when that happens, even your consumer will not really be, even if you ask the consumer why are you buying it? They’re going to list the features and benefits, even though that’s not what really built the connection.

Matthew Burns:
Exactly. Well listen, we’re not saying that features and benefits aren’t important. We’re not saying that they don’t exist. What we’re saying is that’s not the top of the funnel. That’s not what makes them connect to you.

Stephen Semple:
Correct.

Matthew Burns:
And so everybody knows what an Apple computer does or what an iPhone does differently than let’s say a Google Android phone or a PC run by Windows. I mean, it’s not that we don’t know these things, but it’s not what draws us in. It’s not where the allure comes from. It’s when you decided you want to know because the brand seems like they’re my brand, that you go and you look for those details and then they come out. It’s storytelling information, it’s selling information. And thanks for bringing this one up. You’ve given me the heebie-jeebies, I don’t like it at all. I think we should not talk anymore about it.

Stephen Semple:
Moving along.

Matthew Burns:
Oh my gosh. But great point. Thank you for bringing that up. Yes. let’s get some more Sticky Sales Stories. Alright. And I think you’ve got another unique one that we want to talk about. So I’m going to go to another video. Watch the next one!

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