Phil

The longer I work in corporate, the more I realize… the people making the decisions rarely understand the work.

Tech companies pay millions of dollars for their employees and then stick them in open-plan offices that make it nearly impossible to get work done. Best strategy for poaching employees is probably to just offer them an office with a door.

Good leadership is easy to define: the ability to drive better outcomes with less suffering. It's essentially the same definition as good design. Leadership is simply the design of business and teams.

Taste aside — from a purely strategic perspective, this brand marketing is disastrous for Jaguar. For context, Jaguar sales have been plummeting (down 70% in the US in five years). It’s a crisis. Their #1 strategic imperative for comms and marketing should be to sell cars. So let’s analyze it through that lens. Up to 2018, Jaguar was actually growing quickly, doubling sales in a few years. Their subsequent decline was caused by two main things: 1) LAGGING INNOVATION AND ENGINEERING Jaguar went five (!) years without releasing a new production model, and their technology felt outdated. 2) UNCLEAR POSITIONING Jaguar got stuck between lanes. They used to be associated with classic sophistication and luxury, competing effectively with Bentley and Aston Martin in a rarefied space. But then they shifted down to premium, competing with the likes of BMW and Mercedes in a more crowded market. Jaguar SUV sales are cannibalized by their own sister brand (Range Rover). Now they’re not upscale enough to compete in the luxury market, and not cutting edge enough to compete in the premium market. DOUBLING DOWN Even at a basic level, we know that any Jaguar rebrand should (1) highlight innovation, and engineering, and (2) pick a clear lane for branding. Here they’ve done the opposite. This campaign is about “collaborating with a collective of original creators across the arts,” according to Jaguar’s website, which has been taken over by the rebrand. That message is roughly the opposite of what Jaguar should be saying, which is some version of “our cars are engineered to the gills and go very very fast.” Art school grads simply aren’t associated with elite engineering ability, I’m sorry. It’s possible a marketing exec read too many think pieces about how millennials shop based on values and forgot that people want cars that are really well built. On top of that, instead of choosing a clear lane, Jaguar’s brand has meandered further into no man’s land. Literally — this is NOT for men. While men have been an important audience for Jaguar historically (it’s a favored ride for James Bond and Bruce Wayne), the latest campaign features six women and two people of indistinguishable gender (one appears to be a man but I don’t want to assume). If they’re going to abandon the male audience, they should replace it with a more lucrative audience, and it’s unclear who they’re going for here. Vegans? So the same way Jaguar lost the ultra luxury segment without winning the premium segment, with this campaign they’re losing the “classic sophistication” audience without winning the “Just Stop Oil” audience. It’s risky to be an orphan brand. MISSED ZEITGEIST Lastly, Jaguar simply failed to read the room. We are in an era of NOSTALGIA. People want to RETVRN. Tradition, heritage, and classics are more in demand than they’ve been for a long time. Jaguar was perfectly positioned. Jaguar’s iconic image of an old school British gentleman — think Sir Roger Moore, a known devotee of the brand — would have been a massive asset in today’s environment. Why not a retro themed campaign contrasting state of the art technology with a 70s aesthetic? TIME FOR A TURNAROUND This is like when movies used to come out in other countries a year after they were done showing in Hollywood. The vibe of this rebrand might have worked in 2021, but to drop this in late 2024 only emphasizes the reasons for Jaguar’s brand decline in the first place: it’s outdated and confusing. Apparently Jaguar is planning a broader brand reset for 2025. From early indications, that reset is misguided and likely to fail. Jaguar is a luxury product so their brand can make or break sales, and in this case, they’ll need a U-turn to get back on track.

Most system requirements are driven by business needs, not user needs, and our struggle to use them reflects that fact. This is why computer games are better architected than business systems. It’s not the complexity; it’s the user focus. x.com/hpdailyrant/st…

This is basically what has happend to the digital design industry over the past 20 years. Industrialisation has moved UX design from being involved in the whole process to being relegated to a production role in the middle.

Designers believe that it’s their job to solve user and business problems through the medium of design. Sadly executives and product managers believe that it’s their job to solve these problems and it’s the designers job to implement their solutions.

Talking about work in a podcast. Interaction and UX design at BMW Group for BMW Maps and MINI Maps. Challenges, fun and a lot about collaboration with developers: developersincars.de/2024/04/12/Nor…

TIL: You can restart your Siri Remote (tv+volumedown). Why would you need to do this? E.g. your remote thinks you are holding down tv+back and keeps restarting your AppleTV. 🙄

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I was continuously distressed at Meta over how few people in the VR org would actually talk to customers using the products, or even read the app reviews and user voice comments they had taken the time to write. Bold New Visions were way more popular than Fixing Broken Shit.

Today is INTERNATIONAL LEGO DAY. To celebrate, we have a collection of classic movies recreated with the iconic toy, with the creators too… First up, 2001: A Space Odyssey by Ladondorf 1/25

@hpdailyrant … but the _good_ kind of diarrhea.

@flyosity 🥴

how does this make you feel?

@harrybr Are designers now getting THAT young?

@andybudd It seems though, that sometimes for managers it‘s easier to brag about the rockstar who averted crisis than have a well like machine of session musicians delivery quirks without drama.

You don’t need a rock star. You need a session musician. A professional who will come in and get the job done effectively and with low ego.

@luiskamino Hey, don’t be so sure about colors and lines! youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg?si… 😉

🤣 Completely. It continues to boggle my mind the kind of basics designers and developers ignore or don't care, which end up needing notes like "This white line here is white. It is not red or pink. Please do not use black. Remember, this line is white".

@harrybr With electric cars we now have the issue of so many new features, that people do not know about. It‘s a huge human interface issue.

A lot of the content I see around ethical design pre-supposed that designers have both agency and influence. However I find that user centred designers already think about their work ethically, so the problem isn’t a lack of frameworks but a lack of power.

Behold my new favorite parable of design, engineering, and the need for up-front clarity in project intention