Jaguar is going for it. And, you have to say, doing great things with how it’s communicating the brand. British, edgy, daring, contemporary, it’s making the most of the freedom it has compared with the premium-brand grandees Audi, BMW and Mercedes. It’s Paul Smith to Hugo Boss, Arts and Crafts to Bauhaus, Virgin to Lufthansa, The Who to the Scorpions. It’s punk premium.

The German carmakers can’t reinvent themselves like Jaguar’s doing. They’ve got solid-core brands and big market shares to protect, and are now mainstream players. They sell in every segment of the market, including to fleet managers and folk who would have been driving Fords and Peugeots until a few years ago, whereas no matter how successful Jaguar becomes it’s going to remain a relatively small-volume player. But unlike the other small premium brands, Lexus and Infiniti, it has heritage, so it can communicate like a niche brand, in a confident and exclusive way. It simply doesn’t need to appeal to everyone.

So it’s pushing the boundaries, and the high-profile Good to be Bad campaign works well, at least for the USA. The ad has been well cast with alternatives to the mainstream: Tom Hiddleston isn’t yet stereotyped, and Mark Strong, essentially a supporting actor, makes for a believable villain. Yes, since playing the terrifying Don Logan, in Sexy Beast, Ben Kingsley exudes barely contained psychosis – someone Ray Winstone wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. And yet he’s suitably ambiguous, a richly spiced mix of Gandhi, RSC and Iron Man. This is a sharp selection of bad boys for the new brand.

But the use of actors and celebrities, no matter how carefully chosen, is a well-worn route and a rather prescriptive brand tool. We don’t really think that the good-to-be-baddies drive Jaguars.

Jaguar is cooler than this. Earlier this month, somewhat more quietly, it launched the ‘100 Most Connected’ list with GQ, first F-Type customer Jose Mourinho and the very now Editorial Intelligence organisation, which connects the UK’s most influential people and curates relaxed meeting-of-minds get-togethers. The next one is at Aldeburgh, the Victorian Suffolk coastal town. True, it now serves as a seaside London suburb, but it’s very deliberately not Davos.

In engaging with this community Jaguar is aligning itself with state-of-the-art thinking: we’re now in a networked world, where who you know means what you know. Where top-down power is beginning to be unseated by a free flow of information. Where companies are beginning to value knowledge and thinking as much as revenues and profit. Where CSR is beginning to be questioned by a genuine desire to improve the quality of people’s lives. Where we need companies, brands and politicians to believe in what they’re doing.

So here we have Alain de Botton and David Beckham, Peter Fincham and Lionel Barber, Idris Elba and Andrew Neil holding hands in the Most Connected list, gazing out at the sea and feeling the sand between their toes. With Jaguar in amongst it. The message is that the company is progressive enough to embrace the new, post-recession world – one in which failure of the financial system, the need for sustainability and the growth of digital interaction have created a real shift in the way people think and communicate. Jaguar is absorbing influences from the varied spheres which a company providing something as vital as mobility should do.

In an essentially conservative, old-fashioned motor industry driven by the imperative to sell and month-end figures, Jaguar is probably the only brand which can do this. It has an extraordinary opportunity – to demonstrate an understanding that, in future, brands will be shaped not so much by traditional marketing messages as by changes in corporate thinking and behaviour. By actions rather than words. By engaging with people. By doing good.

Utopian vision? It’s happened before. As Henry Ford, the man who mass-mobilised the world, said: “To do more for the world than the world does for you – that is success.”

Note: Go to http://www.citizenrenaissance.com for more about progressive communications from the UK’s leading exponent Robert Philips, ex-Edelman EMEA President & CEO and founder of http://www.jerichochambers.com