New Jaguar XJ – the Marketing

Elle Macpherson and Jay Leno - the very start of marketing for the new Jaguar XJ

Marketing

Sales of the old Jaguar XJ have not been a resounding success, certainly in later years. True, it is an exceptionally good car, and the Jaguar XJ Diesel has remarkable economy and has been voted Greenest Luxury Car three years on the trot. But even that didn’t see the old XJ shifting in the sort of numbers Jaguar wanted. So what to do now?

One thing you will see if you do any amount of air travel is the complete takeover by Jaguar of T5 at Heathrow. Huge billboards, touch-screen adverts, in-flight magazines – arrivals and departures all – will be barraged with the new Jaguar XJ for a whole month. And it’s a clever – and cost-effective – move by Jaguar. Jaguar XJs aren’t the cheapest cars on the planet, and users of T5 are likely candidates.

You will also see Jaguar looking to new media for coverage. In the run-up to the launch they had at least 20 million views on the SKY website with adverts for the new XJ. They also had huge coverage from car sites around the world (Cars UK included) and were suitably chuffed with that coverage and thrilled with the immediacy of it. And they are right. Sales of car magazines have been in decline for years, and web sites have taken over with their free, up to the minute coverage of car news. Even big titles like ‘Car Magazine’ probably manage less than 100,000 sales a month, which is dwarfed by the visitors we get at Cars UK. And if you look at the really big site – like Autoblog in the States – they are getting something like 1 million visits a day. Doesn’t take a genius to work out where you should direct your advertising budget.

Well, one picture just wasn't enough!

And Jaguar are also going after the Chauffeur car market. Which makes a lot of sense. The LWB versions of the new Jaguar XJ are only £3k more than the SWB versions, which means you can have a decent chauffeur car in the Jaguar XK Diesel LWB from around £55k. And it will average around 40mph.

But we think another area they should be pursuing is product placement. Get some ‘Cool’ for the Big Cat by getting the right people in the car in the public eye. I don’t mean freebies for celebs (although Jay Leno would help, and Elle Macpherson did look even better than the new XJ – and she’s even older than the original XJ!), I mean film and TV.

Did you see Torchwood this week? Now I have no idea whether Jaguar product-placed there or not, but if they did it didn’t work. The good-looking XJ (the old model) was driven by the geek-baddie (who turned in to a more sympathetic character by the end) but that doesn’t give the right message. Equally, the cool character – Captain Jack – drove an abomination of a Range Rover (same company – JLR). I hope it wasn’t JLR’s doing.

They need to do what Mercedes did with the E-Class in Men in Black. Make it look cool. How about getting Boyd in to one for Waking the Dead (and Trevor Eve’s a big petrol-head)? Get Martin Shaw in one in Judge Deed. Work the same sort of deal in Hollywood and on TV around the world. Opinions would soon move in favour of the new XJ.

But if the marketing team is up to the job ,they already know a lot better than we do.

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