Jaguar's new rebrand is getting murdered online, and for good reason. The clichés are as thick as the diversity pandering is dated. CREATE EXUBERANT. LIVE VIVID. DELETE ORDINARY. You'd think these were slogans from a Will Ferrel bit about insufferable marketing trons, but nope, that's the 2024 campaign for a car maker that won't be selling any cars until 2026. Utterly tone-deaf, out of tune with the vibe shift, and quite likely the final gasp of a storied but dying British brand. SAD!

Contrast this with the advertisement for Volvo's latest EX90. It's a 3:45-minute emotional cinematic ride that illustrates to perfect what it means to have a strong brand. To stand for something, and actually mean it. 

It's not even that original! They did a variation of the same theme six years ago for the same car, but that detracts nothing from its brilliance. In fact, the opposite. Brand is like culture: It's all about repetition and authenticity. Being who you say you are, over and over.

Volvo is safety, safety is paramount to parents, so Volvo is for parents. It's that simple, and it's that powerful. But only because it's actually true! You couldn't run this branding campaign for, say, Toyota, and see the same success. Toyota has their roots in reliability. That's their story.

But Volvo literally does care. Their history includes giving away the patent to the seatbelt. In Sweden, they have a crash response team that goes to the scene of accidents involving Volvo cars to learn how they can become safer (and they've been doing this since the 70s!!). And in the UK, the XC90 had no official deaths recorded since the car was introduced in 2004 (at least per 2018).

Volvo also does safety quite differently than most auto makers. They're not just studying and optimizing for the crash-ratings tests, which is what it seems drive most other manufacturers. Their cars do very well when the test expands to include new scenarios because it's designed to be best-in-reality not just best-in-test.

All that is to say that the branding strength of Volvo rests on congruence, consistency, and commitment to doing the same thing, a little better every year, for basically an eternity. It's incredibly inspiring.

Frankly, it makes me want to buy a Volvo! Even though by all sorts of natural inclinations (speed/design/heritage), I should be interested in a new Jaguar. But I wouldn't be caught dead in a Jaguar now. That's the power of advertisement: To lift and to diminish.