A CMO’s Story

Breaking with routine, accelerating with culture: a CMO’s story

Let me take you back a few years. It’s deep in lockdown, but I’m not on furlough. I am the CMO of Jaguar Land Rover’s just-launched car rental business which obviously wasn’t seeing the strongest trading numbers. Despite no one going anywhere soon, we had to ensure continued ‘lights on’ investment from the mothership and prove we could still succeed in this venture.

Lockdown marketing was not a situation or chapter in any marketing playbook, framework, or theory. Like so much of life at the time, this challenge was unprecedented.

We needed more than just a campaign. We needed a culturally sensitive perspective on post-lockdown life from a new tech brand backed by an iconic and historic British car company. Expressed like this with hindsight, it all sounds quite simple. But at the time, it was anything but.

Getting approval from stakeholders was less about ‘selling in’ an idea and more about painting a picture of what would happen if we didn’t do anything. As a team, we favoured forgiveness over permission, as the most important thing was that we were united and committed to taking on the challenges and risks as one.

The idea itself was “Break Your Routine,” an immersive driving experience launched just as London emerged from lockdown. We encouraged people to ‘kidnap’ themselves from the lockdown work-life culture crash while tapping into a desire to return to the outside world and explore.

The idea, content, and comms were pulled from audience-relevant fashion and film cultural points, as were the influential test riders picked from football, automotive, YouTube, comedy, and fashion backgrounds. The work was created with agency friends at The Or, with a big shout-out to Kyle Harman-Turner, then ECD.

‘Break Your Routine’ generated significant awareness and chatter among our audience, industry, and media. Crucially, it inspired and unified us as a business and gave our backers confidence that being brave and doing things differently could deliver strong marketing results. It also proved how culturally relevant work can accelerate a business into profit quickly.

This is the story of a single brand, one team, and a (hopefully) unique moment in time. However, the principles hold up and remind me what is possible when our work is not only culturally relevant for the audience but also unifying for the team and impactful as a business.

Hear from Aaron and lots of other brands and culture pioneers on stage at Brands and Culture 2024 in October.