If you saw my last post about the controversial Jaguar re-brand then you may have noted that I referenced a question I’d love to know the answer to.
You can call it morbid curiosity and perhaps it comes from a place of “yes, I’ve been there”. But if I could – this is the question I’d ask…
“At what point in the project did you realise it was going downhill fast – and why didn’t you speak up?”
Because as much as you can’t blame the creative agency for something a client signs off on – you can question why they let it get so far.
It seems to me that at some point during the back and forth of ideas and discussions someone on that team must have realised a big mistake was being made and the re-brand of one of our finest “British” luxury car brands was about to become a car crash.
So why didn’t they speak up?
I think if you’ve been in the creative industry long enough you’ve been a witness to this very situation more than once. I know I have. And it is hard to be the one to put your hand up and question the direction, to ask the rest of your team to consider if the creative is still on-brand and on brief – and if it’s not, to stop the silliness and get back to creative brilliance. But sometimes you have to do the hard things, because it is the right thing to do.
Again, I have to reiterate, I don’t know what conversations were had in the creative team during the project and if indeed some brave soul said something, and was perhaps silenced… but rather than criticising the brand agency for the re-brand of Jaguar I just want to know why they didn’t bury the whole concept before it was too late.
