How to kill a brand

There is a lie going round which states the modern world seeks diversity. You cannot turn on the television or listen to any state or corporate apparatchik without hearing the damned word.

In fact, this so-called ‘diversity’ demands uniformity. The more ‘diverse’ things become, the more everything becomes the same. People talk the same away, afraid of transgressing society’s newest norms; everywhere looks the same with the identikit modernist architecture which abhors originality; on every street we have the same pizza-kebab takeaways run by who-knows-wheres of recent arrival.

Actual individual character – be it on the personal or civilisational level – is loathed more than anything. Given that individuality is derived from the collective experience of an individual’s or culture’s past, it must be done away with – so long as it is Western, that is. As we all know: White Man Bad, Everyone Else Good.

It is straight out of the communist playbook. For a classic demonstration see Mao’s Cultural Revolution. At least their cultural revolution had uniforms and stirring songs. Ours just has blokes dressed as women and mandatory rainbow coloured buttplugs.

For proof look no further than Jaguar. The firm has recently undergone a bold ‘rebranding’, in which it flushed its history down the toilet – doing away with the traditional jaguar’s head – and instead adopting a hyper-simplified, characterless rendering of the word ‘Jaguar’.

Here’s some woodworking from my DT class. LOL not really it’s Jaguar’s new logo

Upon seeing this boring, unoriginal – yet perfectly representative – ‘modern reimagining’ of the brand’s identity, I immediately prophesied the company’s demise. I don’t hold any shares in Jaguar Land Rover, but if I did I’d be inclined to SELL SELL SELL.

The more of this awful rebranding I saw, the more convinced I became. Subsequently seeing the accompanying advert, which was suitably bold and norm-defying, full as it was of androgenous-looking, uncanny-valley weirdos acting weirdly, it seemed that Jaguar had fully jumped the shark and was embarking on its own attempt to be the next Bud Lite. An insightful YouTube comment quipped that Jaguar’s pronouns are ‘was/were’.

After all, the fifty-somethings who like to go to the golf course – the brand’s usual loyal foot soldiers – might think twice about being associated with a brand of such raucous queerness. It is now simply another company which has fully embraced glomohomogenity, rejecting the last century of history and embracing tedious postmodernism.

Who ever saw a Jaguar and thought to themselves ‘they’d sell more cars by becoming fully woke’? Nobody, apart from the idiots in their marketing department. The Managing Director himself, Mr Raw Dong Lover – sorry, Mr Rawdon Glover – chimed in, stating that the reaction (this piece included, one assumes) had featured ‘vile hatred and intolerance’. Plus ca change.

The only kind of people who think in this ham-fisted fashion are a vanishingly small minority who, regrettably, have worked their way into positions of power across society. The Dictgaytorship, perhaps. They only account for a percent of the population, yet they steer the ship of our civilisation headlong into jagged rocks of destruction.

Listening to the head of branding at Jaguar, one can quickly sense how ideologically driven such bizarre creatures are. Every word emanating from they/them’s thoughtless mind is the product of a mind totally ideologically captured. It is a veritable word salad of bullshit, which anyone – quite literally anyone – has the capability of reproducing at the drop of a rainbow-adorned hat.  

Yet what such types cannot do so easily is engineer a car. To ask them to do anything vaguely productive would have them crawling to a teddy-bear festooned safespace. After all, would you buy a car from the bloke pictured below? I wouldn’t; maybe I’d buy a flat white off him, but nothing more.

Tediously ordinary. Who wants to tell him?

This stupid debacle, is, in microcosm, a perfect example of why Europe is a busted flushed. We continue to linger on, squeezing every last remaining iota of juice out of the fruits of our ancestors: the brands, the institutions, the industry. Little-to-nothing new of any value is created, instead our inheritance is used as some kind of disposable plaything.

No new Jaguars are created, instead their legacy is tarnished. We gradually will become, as Draghi recently predicted, a living museum. There is no innovation nor vision, just a fat welfare state churning out useless art graduates who seek nothing more than to become petty bureaucrats as that is where the good salaries and fat pensions are.

If only there were historical lessons of societies whose dynamism failed and who elevated the state above all else, leading to their eventual demise – perhaps we could take heed.

Even though we import much of this societal poison from the United States, they at least remain wedded to free market capitalism in a way that makes the average European cringe with revulsion. They may be packed with the same blue-haired types that we are, but they simultaneously have Tesla, Nvidia and Google. Europe is propped up with last century’s industrial concerns, who they are suffocating amid insane energy and labour policies. Europeans remain haughty and arrogant, unaware that the floor beneath their feet is slowly rotting away.

At this point I would rather buy a Chinese car. At least they won’t try and turn me into a LGBT-flag-waving lover of mandatory sodomy as every Western corporate seems to want to do.

I spent much of my twenties being a relative sceptic of Beijing. It was pointless, however, as Western politicians sacrificed our competitive advantage on the altar of short-term shareholder interest. Millions of people’s jobs destroyed, our industrial capacity hamstrung, and the baton of technological advancement hurled eastwards, all so that a few greedy souls could spin a quick buck.

But now – who cares. The worm has turned. The Unipolar moment has gone and we are sliding into irrelevance. Time to see face the world as it is, not as we want it to be. I’m not saying it’s too late to change tack: a few sensible decisions would do much to ameliorate our sorry state. Yet, there is no sign of that happening in Europe.

Strong glimpses of hope are emerging, so I do not mean to be unduly pessimistic. Papa Trump in the USA and Monsieur Milei in Argentina – these are century-altering experiments upcoming and already underway. Europe, however, remains wedded to the failed policy of post-war naivety where prosperity and stability was unearned.

As Europe’s demographics irrevocably alter and its economic model is proven hopeless unproductive, the chasm between it and the rest of the world will continue to grow. How can any system continue in which, to take Germany for example, 63% of all welfare recipients are of a foreign background? It is simply not credible.

With all of these things you can see them on the micro and macro level. The obviousness of it is there for all to see. The only problem is that so many have a vested interest in sustaining a dishonest blindness. The only ones who can see clearly are those who, generally, are without a voice.

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Hello reader! Long time no update. I can only apologise for this. I have been suffering from a bout of melancholia which entirely stifled my desire to write. Nothing too dramatic, but just enough to hinder my creative urge. I have written many thousands of words in the last few months, none of which managed to form a coherent article, however. As someone said, creativity is like a bug on the wall: no matter how much want you want to whack it, some times you just have to let it come down to you.