Jaguar's rebrand looked like an explosion, but structurally it changed almost nothing. McLaren's looks like nothing happened, yet it quietly rebuilt the entire business. Most of us are judging these things on the wrong measure.
A week ago, McLaren revealed a new brand identity, and the internet did what the internet does: everyone compared it to Jaguar.
The verdict was pretty universal. In 2024, Jaguar went bold. It deleted its whole visual world, released a film full of people in bright clothing with no car to be seen, and got absolutely mauled for it. McLaren, on the other hand, went quiet and careful. It kept its Speedmark, pulled a new wordmark from an old family photo, and got a warm reception.
So the lesson everyone landed on was simple: restraint wins, and boldness is dangerous.
That reading is wrong, and if you believe it, it could cost you serious money.
When you actually look at what each business was trying to solve, Jaguar and McLaren had almost exactly the same problem. It wasn't just similar. It was the same. Both had a brand whose meaning couldn't carry the company where it was heading. Jaguar was moving to all-electric at six figures and going after a customer who had never bought a Jaguar and didn't want their dad's. McLaren, meanwhile, is about to sell an SUV and enter WEC Hypercar racing, even though nearly all of its brand meaning is held by one division that performs on Sunday afternoons.
The diagnosis was the same, but the method was completely different, and the method is the whole story.
A petrol station in Remuera
The new McLaren wordmark comes from the sign above the family service station in Auckland. Bruce McLaren's parents, Les and Ruth, ran it, and it's where Bruce built his first car. In other words, the brand's next chapter had been sitting in its own archive the whole time.
Two divisions, one identity
For the first time, McLaren Automotive and McLaren Racing operate under a single connected identity system. That's the real change, and it isn't a visual one.
1997
The last time McLaren made an identity change this significant was when the Speedmark arrived. That tells you this wasn't a seasonal refresh.
Copy Nothing
Jaguar's 2024 tagline, which asked people to believe in a new meaning that had nothing underneath it yet.
Most people judge a rebrand by how different it looks. That's the wrong measure, and it's the reason so many expensive rebrands change everything visible while fixing nothing real.
The right question is much less exciting but much more useful: what can this brand hold now that it couldn't hold before?
Jaguar's problem was real, and its decision to move was defensible. It was selling fewer and fewer cars to an aging audience, so the plan was to stop, go quiet, and come back as something else entirely at a much higher price. That's a company trying to survive a shift in its category.
Unfortunately, Jaguar deleted the past to get there. It had a new wordmark, a new palette and new everything, along with a launch film that asked a completely new customer to believe Jaguar now meant something it had never meant before. The trouble with asserting a new meaning is that, on its own, an assertion is just a claim, and people are extremely good at spotting a claim with nothing behind it. That's why "Copy Nothing" sounded arbitrary to so many people. At that moment, it really was, because there was nothing yet to make it feel earned.
McLaren needed new meaning just as much, but it went looking for it somewhere else. It went backwards. Its new wordmark comes from the sign above a service station in Remuera, Auckland, which was run by Bruce McLaren's parents and was where he built his first race car. McLaren kept the Speedmark and it kept the Speedy Kiwi. Then, in effect, it said: this is who we have always been, and here is the proof.
Both of those brands changed, but only one of them had receipts. When you assert new meaning from nothing, people have to take it on faith, and audiences rarely extend faith to companies. When you dig new meaning out of your own history, however, it arrives with evidence attached. That's why it lands as recognition rather than as a request.
The most useful part for the rest of us is that almost every business has an archive it has never mined. It might be the reason you started, or the thing you used to do and then quietly dropped. It could be your first client, your original promise, or the sentence you said in every sales conversation before you got self-conscious about it. McLaren's next chapter was sitting in a photograph of a petrol station. Finding it cost nothing more than a willingness to look backwards instead of at what everyone else was doing.
On the surface, McLaren changed a font, tightened a wordmark and underlined a letter. As a visual exercise, there's barely enough there to have an opinion about, which is exactly why most of the commentary called it safe.
Underneath, though, it's by far the bigger structural move of the two. For decades, McLaren Automotive and McLaren Racing effectively operated as separate brands, and now they've been unified into one identity system. That sounds like housekeeping until you ask why they'd bother. The answer is in the product roadmap: McLaren is about to sell an SUV, and it's entering WEC Hypercar. Right now, an SUV buyer and a Formula 1 fan meet two different McLarens with two different sets of expectations, and you can't sell someone a school-run car on a brand that only means Sunday afternoons.
So this was a strategic decision that happened to need design. The brand had run out of room to hold what the business wanted to do next, and the identity work is what made that room.
Volume is not depth. Most founders judge a rebrand by how different it looks, because that's the easiest thing to see, even though it's the least useful thing to measure. The real question is what the brand can hold now that it couldn't hold before. By that measure, the loud rebrand was the shallow one, and the quiet one was the radical one.
If you're thinking, "Rach, I run something much smaller than a supercar company," hold tight, because this problem scales all the way down, and it shows up constantly.
Take a coach with a 1:1 practice, a group program and a self-paced course. Whether or not she's ever used the phrase, she's running a brand portfolio. She has three offers for three completely different buyers, each with a different promise, and all of them are trying to live under one name that was originally built for the first offer. So when the course underperforms, she'll blame the launch, the price, the funnel or the algorithm. Usually it's none of those. The brand simply had no room to hold it.
It's the same problem McLaren faced, just with fewer zeros on the end.
It would be easy to end this with "heritage good, boldness bad," but that would be lazy, and it also wouldn't be true.
The criticism of McLaren's new identity is fair and worth sitting with. A lot of people have pointed out that the new wordmark could belong to almost any luxury brand, and more than one commenter compared it to a hotel loyalty program. When every heritage brand mines its archive and lands on clean, confident, minimal type, a whole category starts to look interchangeable. Provenance buys you truth, but it doesn't automatically buy you distinctiveness, and those are two very different assets.
In fairness, the Jaguar story isn't finished either. The cars haven't fully rolled out, the strategy was always a long game, and a rebrand that gets shouted at on the internet isn't necessarily one that fails commercially. Plenty of brands have been mocked on the way to being right. What we can judge right now is the method rather than the outcome, and Jaguar's method was to ask for belief before offering evidence.
There's a real trade-off here. Excavating your history gives you a story people can verify, but you risk looking like everyone else who did the same. Inventing new meaning makes you distinctive immediately, but it asks your audience for a level of faith most of them have no reason to give. Neither approach is automatically correct. The real decision is knowing which one your business can actually afford.
For most businesses reading this, though, the answer leans one way. McLaren and Jaguar both have enormous budgets and decades of public awareness. If you have neither, asserting a brand-new meaning from scratch is a very expensive way to find out whether anyone believes you. Finding the truth you already have and saying it more clearly than ever is slower and much less glamorous, but it's far more likely to work.
Stop judging a rebrand by how different it looks.
The visible change is the easiest thing to have an opinion about, but it's the least useful thing to measure. Instead, ask what the brand can hold now that it couldn't before. A rebrand that changes everything visible but expands nothing structurally is just an expensive cosmetic exercise. On the other hand, a rebrand that looks like almost nothing happened can quietly be the most important decision a business makes all decade.
Your brand architecture is a growth constraint before it's ever a design problem.
Most businesses discover this the hard way. You launch something adjacent, it underperforms, and everyone blames the product, the price or the marketing. Sometimes they really are the cause. Very often, though, the brand simply had no room to hold the new thing, and no amount of campaign budget can fix a structural problem.
You're probably running a portfolio without knowing it.
If you have more than one offer aimed at more than one type of buyer, you already have a brand portfolio. The only question is whether you designed it or just accumulated it. Write down every offer you sell and who it's for. If two of them need fundamentally different things from you but both sit under one undifferentiated name, you've probably found the reason one of them keeps underperforming.
Mine your archive before you invent anything.
McLaren's next chapter was on a petrol station sign in Auckland. So before you pay anyone to create new meaning for your business, go back through your own history. Look at the reason you started, your original promise, and the thing you used to say before you started second-guessing yourself. Meaning you can prove will always beat meaning you have to assert, because one arrives as recognition while the other arrives as a claim.
Know whether you can afford faith.
Asking people to believe a completely new story about you takes either an enormous budget or an enormous amount of existing goodwill, and usually both. If you have neither, the smarter move is almost always to take what's already true about you and say it with far more clarity and confidence than you have been. That isn't playing small. It's choosing the strategy your business can actually fund and follow through on.
The question this edition leaves you with isn't whether your brand needs a refresh, because that's the question everyone starts with. Instead, it's this: what's the next thing you want your business to do, and does your brand currently have room to hold it? If the honest answer is no, you don't have a design brief. You have strategic work to do, and no new logo is going to do it for you.
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