Signal
The Melody.
For decades, Jaguar wasn’t just a luxury car company. It was a statement.
Its design echoed the hand of founder William Lyons: simple, flowing forms. British elegance, not as a costume, but as a lineage. Quiet luxury. Primal performance. A sleek synthesis of understated beauty and engineering ambition. This was not just design. It was identity.
From the XK120 to the legendary E-Type and the Le Mans-dominating C-Type and D-Type, Jaguar had a unique signal: elegance meets engineering. Form meets function. Britain meets the open road.
But in 2024, facing declining sales and growing EV pressure, Jaguar reached a strategic crossroads.
Their leadership did what many companies would: they turned to reinvention. A bold rebrand. A total transition to EV. A new luxury tier. A new identity.
The business logic made sense. EV transition was inevitable. Repositioning toward ultra-luxury offered margin upside. Culture-forward branding might attract younger, global buyers.
A reinvention wasn’t a bad idea. But what followed wasn’t a rebrand. It was a severance.
Under the leadership of Chief Creative Officer Gerry McGovern, Jaguar traded elegant performance for “Exuberant Modernism” — The leaping cat and growler for a stylized wordmark (“JaGUar”). Classic tones for an electric color palette. Horsepower and heritage for abstraction and art direction. Timeless engineering for transient trend.
Instead of evolving their signal from their core essence, they borrowed the signals of others: Tesla’s minimalism, Bentley’s price tag, fashion house aesthetics, and the performative language of cultural progressivism.
The result was not an evolution.
It was a signal inversion.
What had once been elevated simplicity and primal power now was felt as synthetic, performative, and unanchored.
Jaguar, once a symbol of graceful force, now felt like a brand in costume — trying on borrowed codes, disconnected from lineage.
They lost 85% of their current customer base. And by mid-2025, Jaguar had sold fewer than 2,000 vehicles in the U.S.
We may call this a failed rebrand. Many have.
Some blame a tone-deaf abandonment of loyal buyers. Others point to poor market timing, a gap between vision and product, or a misunderstanding of what modern luxury truly means.
All of these critiques are true. But they are symptoms — not source.
The real failure was not aesthetic. It was below the surface. Jaguar projected a signal with no source — a shape with no soul.
Signal ≠ Marketing.
Signal is not what you say. It’s what the world feels.
Signal is not your brand. It’s not your creative messaging, ad copy, or marketing strategy.
Signal ≠ marketing. Signal ≠ brand strategy. Signal ≠ polished design, creative messaging, or viral campaigns.
These are simply projection surfaces.
It is the frequency your business broadcasts — whether intentional or not. Not just what you say — but what you emit. And that frequency either resonates or repels.
Where Essence defines the soul and animating intention of your business, and Coherence aligns it internally, then Signal is what the world actually receives.
At its root, signal is an inside-out phenomenon.
It cannot be fabricated, borrowed, or manufactured.
Marketing strategies often attempt an outside-in approach — shaping perception, engineering resonance, hacking visibility. It tells us to chase attention. To split-test personality. That clarity comes from copywriting, resonance from metrics, and brand from someone we hire.
But the truth of a business is always felt underneath.
This is why authenticity — not virality, not visibility — is the real metric of signal strength. And authenticity is not something you manufacture.
True signal is something you tune. And tuning begins at the root.
Signal flows from Essence, shaped by Coherence, and felt through every touchpoint.
In the age of AI — where brands, content, and personas can be spun up in seconds — clarity of signal has never been more vital. Because what can be faked at the surface still emits dissonance from the core.
As we map modern business signals, two things will become clear.
When a signal is manufactured or borrowed — disconnected from essence or confused by incoherence — businesses can only grow louder, not clearer. Their message may spread, but it won’t land. It may attract attention, but not alignment. And over time, they exhaust energy trying to compensate for a signal that doesn’t ring true.
But when signal is tuned — when it flows from soul and structure — the transmission becomes magnetic. These businesses don’t just grow faster. They grow cleaner. They attract aligned customers, inspired collaborators, and unlock a kind of natural momentum that can’t be faked.
Outside-in Signal.
In 1985, Coca-Cola — feeling the heat from Pepsi’s growing market share — made a decision that would become one of the most iconic signal missteps in modern history.
In response to blind taste tests and mounting competitive pressure, leadership launched “New Coke,” a sweeter formulation designed to match Pepsi’s profile.
On paper, the move made sense. The data suggested consumers preferred the sweeter taste. Initial sales spiked. The taste reviews were good. Buzz surged. But beneath the metrics, something vital was lost.
After the curiosity sales spike, core customers revolted and the launch collapsed within three months. Coca-Cola reintroduced the original recipe as “Coke Classic” — a move that not only salvaged the brand but re-crowned it. Ironically, the failed launch reaffirmed the public’s emotional bond with the original Signal.
The brand’s essence had always been built around classicness. Timelessness. Americana. Emotional memory. But this move replaced soul with science.
In trying to out-Pepsi Pepsi, Coca-Cola abandoned the very frequency that made them resonate so deeply.
This wasn’t just a failed product launch. It was a signal rupture. Coca-Cola attempted to evolve from the outside-in and chased attention and market share rather than tuning inward. And the world felt the dissonance.
Perhaps the most recent example of a signal fracture on full display has been Cracker Barrel.
Steeped in Southern nostalgia, with its “Uncle Herschel” logo since 1977 — they attempted a brand reset under new CEO Julie Felss Masino. The goal: modernize, attract younger diners, and revitalize foot traffic. A $700 million rebrand was launched, including a minimalist logo, restaurant interior modern redesigns, and menu updates with trendy selection pulled from market research.
But something critical was missed: the company’s essence — rooted in Southern comfort, heritage, and a lived-in Americana — wasn’t just a design aesthetic. It was the emotional signal that had made Cracker Barrel feel like home.
Within days, customers revolted. 76% preferred the old Cracker Barrel, causing a company-wide backlash. The brand’s value plummeted. Even President Trump amplified the outrage. Social pressure and shared sentiment forced a rapid reversion to the original design. Cracker Barrel publicly restored “Uncle Herschel” and reaffirmed its roots, causing stock to rebound.
This wasn’t just a failed rebrand born of bad market data. It was a signal inversion.
Cracker Barrel tried to refresh from the outside-in and the world felt it and responded.
Inside-out Signal.
In 2014, Airbnb unveiled its now-iconic “Bélo” logo, stepping beyond its couch-surfing roots into a vision of belonging.
This was not a rebrand chasing trend or surface aesthetics. It emerged from introspection.
Internally, Airbnb leadership — including Brian Chesky — realized they weren’t in the business of vacation rentals. They were in the business of human experience, belonging anywhere. The symbol, though controversial at first, was born from this insight: a universal mark of people, places, love, and Airbnb’s role in connecting them.
The signal didn’t come from a design brief. It came from essence — from a soul-deep recalibration of what the company truly was becoming.
Messaging, product design, community building, and even host policies aligned behind this new clarity.
Leadership actively infused the language of “belonging” into internal talks, strategy documents, and interviews — making it a north star, not just a tagline. Onboarding materials, internal comms, and company rituals reinforced the story of “belonging” internally to employees from day one. Hosts were invited to events, spotlighted in campaigns, and included in policy decisions, ensuring they first felt like they belonged. New review and support policies aimed to reward hosts who embodied the spirit of belonging, not just efficiency. Office spaces were intentionally designed to feel like homes, reinforcing the essence. Internal design mirrored external experience.
Airbnb’s signal didn’t get louder. It got truer.
It came from within — anchored in soul, clarified by structure, and felt through every touchpoint and the brand’s growth accelerated in the years that followed.
If Signal has a North Star in modern business, it might be Patagonia.
Founded with a core essence of environmental responsibility and rugged integrity, Patagonia has consistently broadcast a signal that resonates far beyond marketing. And crucially — it’s felt. Not as positioning. But as truth.
In perhaps it’s greatest projection of signal, they took out a full-page New York Times ad on Black Friday. Patagonia told customers not to buy their product.
The ad detailed the environmental cost of producing a single jacket, encouraging customers to think twice before purchasing. It wasn’t a marketing gimmick — it invited buyers into alignment with their essence, not just a product transaction.
This authentic transmission pierced through the noise of a hyper-consumerist holiday with a coherent, inside-out signal that risked profit in favor of principle.
The result? More loyalty, not less. Patagonia’s sales grew 30% after the campaign, defying expectations that discouraging purchases would hurt profits and the company’s annual revenue rose from $400 million in 2011 to $543 million in 2012.
But signal goes beyond what or who you say you are in ads. And Patagonia originates and projects from far more than their messaging.
Through the Worn Wear program, Patagonia encourages customers to repair rather than replace their gear. They offer repair guides, in-store services, and traveling repair trucks. Patagonia even sells used, refurbished items directly.
In 2022, the Chouinard family transferred ownership of Patagonia to two new entities: a trust to preserve its mission and a nonprofit to channel profits into fighting climate change. The company now gives all excess profit not reinvested into the business to the Holdfast Collective, a climate-focused organization.
Patagonia pays employees to engage in environmental activism. Staff are supported — not punished — for protesting, organizing, or taking political stances aligned with company values. Their internal culture reflects the same principles they project externally.
Over the years, Patagonia has refused multiple buyout and acquisition offers — often from large fashion conglomerates. They’ve also rejected the VC/growth-at-all-costs path in favor of measured, mission-aligned growth.
This is inside-out signal — not invented, but revealed. The marketing matches the mission. The words match the walk. And the resonance? Deep and contagious.
Patagonia doesn’t market its values.
It lives them. And signal is simply the echo of that alignment moving through the world.
The Invitation of Signal.
Every business is broadcasting something. Whether refined or chaotic, clean or confused — signal is always being sent. To investors. To customers. To the team. To the field.
Most don’t realize this.
They see signal as a surface layer — something to design, to write, to deploy. They engineer optics, not resonance.
But signal is not an ad campaign. It is the transmission of your business’s state — its frequency, its coherence, its embodied truth.
Signal reveals what’s really happening under the surface. And the world feels it.
That’s the invitation.
To stop treating marketing as performance. To stop treating branding as costume. To stop building scale atop something that’s hollow.
Start from the core.
Build from the inside-out. Let the signal rise from something real.
This is not about crafting clever campaigns. It’s about cultivating congruence.
Because your messaging can’t outrun your state. Your design can’t mask your dissonance. Your sales strategy can’t compensate for incoherence.
Not to make your signal look right — but to make it ring true.
When signal flows from soul and structure — it becomes magnetic.
This is how the world learns to feel your company — and why they choose to stay.
Let signal emerge as the natural reverb of your essence. Tuned by coherence. Amplified by alignment. Felt across every touchpoint — not just heard, but known.
Because when a business broadcasts a true signal, customers don’t just buy. They resonate. They remember. They return.
Field Notes →
The Anatomy of Signal
6 Signal Projection Surfaces
To be notified when this section releases, simply drop your email here.
Enjoying the White Paper? Join the Community. Share feedback with author.
Next →