Eric Siu breaks down Jaguar's catastrophic April 2025 collapse: sales dropped 97.5% to just 49 units in Europe. The luxury carmaker's fashion-forward rebrand alienated its core audience, a mistake Siu compares to Bud Light's backlash. Know who you're selling to, or lose everything.
Can we just talk about the collapse of Jaguar? The 93% sales volume went down.
No. You didn't read about this? No, I didn't see it.
Did you live under a rock or something?
It wasn't posted on the sites that I read frequently, like CNBC.
All right.
All right.
So, okay. Jaguar's April 2025 Europe sales plunged 97.5% from 1,961 units to just 49 vehicles, marking a near total collapse during this rebranding phase. BMW, Mercedes, and Audi each retained market stability, selling approximately 50 to 75 5,000 units in April 2025 across Europe. You know what?
That's what they get. And you know the marketing? Oh, we stand by it. And like, no one cares.
Guys, people are over that.
Enough.
Yeah. Enough.
It's a car company.
Yeah.
Just show us car stuff.
Yeah.
It's not a fashion show.
Yeah. This is reverse spectacle marketing. This is what— so you pay the price sometimes. And I'm sorry, I'm like, I'm just gonna call out too, like Bud Light, same thing.
You got to know your core audience. And Eric and I, for the record, are not against people deciding what they want with their lives.
They can do whatever they want with their lives.
What they want with their lives. And we're not saying that's bad or anything like that. But what we're saying is, if you have a car company, focus your marketing on creating cars. It should not get to be something that's more political or something that is Trendsetting or something that is more about talking to culture when it has nothing to do with your product or service. It's like, we're a marketing agency. We produce stats and data about marketing. We focus on our tools. I don't go talk about cars or fashion or things that are not related or dentistry. I know that's just random topics, but that's in essence what Jaguar did. They had a fashion show. With people and different outfits. If, correct me if I'm wrong, the last I recall had nothing to do with their car. And I'm like, what the heck is this?
Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side.
And you want to be in fashion and do that? You want to be Dolce Gabbana?
Go for it.
Yep. I don't care. And that probably would help you generate more sales. That makes sense to me. But if you're a car company, why are you focusing on fashion? People want to see what new car you have to release. They don't care about fashion.
You don't want to alienate your core customers. You look at your data, If you look at Bud Light or if you look at Jaguar, who is your core customer? What is their net worth? Where do they live? What kind of people are these people? You want to market to those people. When we create this content, we are marketing, we are trying to teach people what the marketing experiments that we're running, you're trying to give them data, you're trying to basically help people get better at marketing and if they need help with it, great, they can work with you, right? That's just how it is.
Yes, and again, for the record to clarify, Eric and I don't discriminate. In both our companies, we have, Eric has less, people. I don't mean that in a bad way. So, you know, just, he may not have everyone because we have quite a bit of people, 1,000-ish plus or whatever it may be. But we both hire people who are LGBTQ+. Yeah.
Right?
And Eric can have no issues with it. And some of those people are our best employees and they're great at what they do. It's more so Your product is your product. Your core audience is your core audience. You got to stick with the mission. Don't derail because the moment you derail, you can lose a lot of money. And Harley is a great example of this. Do you remember Harley?
Did they derail?
I don't think they derailed. Well, they started focusing more on their core audience and it's helped their sales from the last I checked. And this was like a year and a half ago.
When something's working, double down.
Yeah. Yeah.
There's no need to try to do all these cute things. And you learn this as you get older.
And it doesn't mean that other people can't use your products. Like, I have a good friend, he's gay, love him to death. I've known him for 14, 15 years.
Mm-hmm.
He has a Harley, not like the Harley you would think. Harley has quite a bit of different, what is it called, models, right? But like Harley didn't alienate him. They focused their marketing on the core, you know, people call it like the 5% of the population or 2% of the population that is the majority end user that buys their product, it doesn't mean that the other people can't buy their product. You just want to focus your marketing dollars on your ideal customer profile.
Yep, 100%. All right, that's it for today, guys. We will see you tomorrow.
