Two-door coupes seem like a great idea, right up until the point when you have a new baby. Then you marvel at their stylish inconvenience. 

As I go about the tragic process of trading in my bachelor-mobile for something sedanish, I've been more than usually interested in automotive advertising. And I spotted something rather clever from Jaguar. 

Often lauded as an excellent alternative to the German marques, Jaguars are, nevertheless, fairly rare. Where I live, you may see one on the road for every thirty or more BMW's. 

So what do you do about that, when your goal is to portray the brand in the best possible light?

The answer is: sell it as a virtue. In answer to this conundrum, Jaguar came up with the 'Rare and meant to be' campaign, which inverts an awkward metric and represents it as the brand's inherent selling point. 

What's your most embarrassing metric? At which points do you struggle to compete with the big names? What if you found a way to represent that as somehow 'more exclusive'? 

Here's how Jag did it, and I think it's masterful: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4QKoqycLOk 

 

Douglas Kruger is a professional keynote speaker at conferences around the world. He specialises in disruptive innovation and expert-positioning, helping brands to become more memorable than their competitors’. See him in action, or sign up for his motivational newsletter, at www.douglaskruger.co.za. Book him to present for your leadership team: email info@douglaskrugerspeaker.com