In the face of rapidly plummeting sales, one of the world’s top luxury car brands is firing the creative director faulted for the automobile brand’s “woke” redesign. In November of 2024, Jaguar launched a new marketing campaign to herald the luxury sports car’s redesign, which eliminated the iconic leaping jaguar logo and was reportedly steering the brand in an electric vehicle-only direction. The accompanying ad campaign featured a cast of androgynous minorities clad in avant-garde costumes, exotic extraterrestrial landscapes, and slogans like, “create exuberant,” “live vivid,” “delete ordinary,” “break molds,” and “copy nothing.” Noticeably, the sports car commercial did not feature any cars.

The ad campaign inspired backlash online, with Tesla CEO and tech billionaire Elon Musk asking, “Do you sell cars?” Subsequently, Jaguar’s already-struggling sales numbers plummeted to near-zero. The brand discontinued its internal combustion engine models, including the XE, XF, F-Type, E-Pace, and I-Pace, and began transitioning to electric vehicles only, leaving sparse inventory available in early 2025. By April of 2025, Jaguar sales in Europe had fallen by over 97%, largely due to a halt in production, leaving dealerships with only 10 cars or fewer. Sales also fell in the U.S., from just over 1,000 units in December of 2024 to an average of only 505 over the course of 2025 so far. Jaguar’s stock has also tanked by over 95%, dropping from a high of 32 in early December of 2024 to only 1.01 as of December 4, 2025.

Earlier this year, as sales continued to suffer, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) CEO Adrian Mardell announced that he would be stepping down, although the company insisted that the decision had nothing to do with the electric vehicle rebrand and woke ad campaign. A few days later, JLR named P.B. Balaji, who had been serving as CFO of Tata Motors, which owns JLR, would succeed Mardell. “It is my privilege to lead this incredible company. Over the past 8 years I have grown to know and love this company and its redoubtable global brands. I look forward to working with the team to take it to even greater heights,” Balaji said in a statement. He officially took over as CEO last week.

Evidently, the company needed to jettison some weight to reach those greater heights. On Monday, Balaji fired Jaguar’s chief design officer, Gerry McGovern, who was responsible for the rebrand and associated ad campaign. According to Autocar, McGovern was “escorted out of the office,” although the exact reasons for his firing have not been formally announced. Originally, JLR attempted to defend McGovern’s redesign of the iconic brand. Jaguar managing director Rawdon Glover, for example, said in a 2024 interview that the company decided it “shouldn’t turn up like an auto brand” and would thus “move away from traditional automotive stereotypes.” Glover explained, “We need to re-establish our brand and at a completely different price point so we need to act differently.” He also described backlash against the woke ad campaign as “a blaze” of “vile hatred and intolerance.”

“But for our ability to explain to the world why we made such a change, how this links to our past and our heritage, and why we've chosen the particular icons we have, places like social media have not been a great platform,” Glover said in a separate interview. “Social media is a very binary place. It’s love and hate, it’s black and white. And it’s not great for the kind of context and nuance that are central to what Jaguar is doing,” he added. “Great design polarizes.”

President Donald Trump criticized the Jaguar rebrand earlier this year. In a Truth Social post expressing support for actress Sydney Sweeney, who was castigated by progressives for an American Eagle denim commercial she was featured in over the summer, the president quipped, “Jaguar did a stupid, and seriously WOKE advertisement, THAT IS A TOTAL DISASTER!” He said that Mardell “resigned in disgrace, and the company is in absolute turmoil. Who wants to buy a Jaguar after looking at that disgraceful ad.” Pointing to other companies that have suffered consumer backlash after woke advertising campaigns, he continued, “Shouldn’t they have learned a lesson from Bud Lite, which went Woke and essentially destroyed, in a short campaign, the Company.” The president added, “The tide has seriously turned — Being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be!”