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Wednesday Morning Rant

Wokeness and Brokeness

The common refrain among many regarding poor corporate performance when it correlates with knee-jerk, all-in wokeness is "get woke, go broke." It's sometimes true, but it's often the exact opposite. It is not unheard for essentially healthy companies to go through the "Woke Pivot." When that happens, results are mixed. For Gillette and Bud Light, it is certain that their lurches into contemporary leftist ideology and marketing caused catastrophic and irreparable damage to their brands. Others have had a different experience. Nike and Target were both early boarders of the woke train, and it doesn't appear to have hurt them. It's now part of the brand identity.

But otherwise healthy companies jumping into wokeness with both feet is somewhat unusual. Often, it's more of a high-risk gambit to turn things around. Companies or brands will go through a Woke Pivot in response to structural problems in their businesses. This is almost certainly behind Victoria's Secret's disastrous leftward lurch. For companies like VS, it isn't a matter of "get woke, go broke" - it's a matter of "go broke, get woke." So, too, is likely the case with Jaguar.

As Ace covered yesterday (standard warning: don't comment on old posts), Jaguar has seen a total sales collapse in Europe as compared to last year. Last year's weak performance was followed by this year's disastrous performance. People are pointing at last year's equally disastrous ultra-woke, ultra-stupid, ultra-poorly-timed and extremely loud Woke Pivot as a major cause. It might be - but there's more to this story. From the Daily Caller article:

Jaguar's European sales plummeted by 97.5% and year-to-date figures show a 75.1% decline in sales, with just 2,665 units sold from January to April 2025. Globally, Jaguar's performance dropped sharply from 180,833 units in 2018 to 26,862 units in FY24/25, holding a market share of just 0.1% in both Australia and the U.K.

So European sales were an unmitigated disaster, but worldwide saw nowhere near the declines that Europe did - but declining they are, and across the board.

So how common is this? I decided to look at a decade's worth of Jaguar/Land Rover (JLR) annual reports and the chart of global Jaguar units sold (taken from the summary of each year's report) paints a stark picture:

With the exception of a modest bump last year, Jaguar's sales have been collapsing since 2018. Jaguar is a dying brand. It's also doing other dumb things many others have mentioned (going all-EV at precisely the wrong time, just at it went all-woke at precisely the wrong time, etc.), but the core problem is that people aren't buying Jags anymore. This year's sales decline and the European sales catastrophe - while notable and extremely dramatic - is just an acceleration of the long-existing trend. The car-buying market has no love for Jaguar, and its sales reflect that.

So they tried for the Woke Pivot. Facing brutal sales declines, an engineering pipeline focused entirely on EV powertrains, shifting market preferences and various other issues, Jaguar made a different play. It is a common and downright normal play: make a lot of noise, do something they think will shock the squares, and go hard at prog messaging in the hopes of bringing in new customers to replace their old customers. It didn't work, and almost certainly made things worse.

From what I could find, Jaguar's customers are, for the most part, well-to-do people who are solidly into - or even on the cusp of exiting - middle age. More men than women buy (or, rather, bought) Jags. With their traditional market of well-off middle-aged men and their wives drying up, they tried to bring in young people and women, and did it in the stupidest way possible - by alienating their core customers and turning themselves into a laughingstock. This was never going to work anyway (young people, by and large, can't afford Jags), but the way they pursued it was also perhaps the most destructive and dumbest way available to them. Alienating your core customers is never likely to get new customers to beat a path to your door.

But like so many companies, Jag is not an example of "get woke, go broke." They were going broke, so decided to get woke. As usual, it didn't work.