Jaguar’s Bold Move to Attract a New Audience
“The team is absolutely unflinching on this: what it’s going to take for Jaguar to succeed and the way that we’re going to do it,” said a spokesperson for the company. “The design teams, the engineering teams – everybody’s been involved in getting it this far.”
Returning to enthusiasts, there has been some frustration that “messages get filtered” and that the new Jaguar may not appeal to those who have been loyal to the brand in the past.
“One example being: ’we are leaving our customers behind; we don’t care about our current customers’. That came from some of the negative commentary. But that was never the intention,” the spokesperson explained.
“I can understand how that has been interpreted, because we’re basically saying Jaguar needs to attract a new audience. But that doesn’t mean to say we’re not interested in our current audience. Quite the opposite. [We] want to take as many of that current audience on that journey with us as possible.
“We probably could have done a better job in just laying that out and explaining the narrative about why we were making the change, why the change was so dramatic. I think that was probably lost in that story. There’s definitely learning in that process.”
There are parallels with how JLR reinvented the Land Rover Defender and upset purists. “It’s definitely a good parallel,” said the spokesperson. “From the experiences in the reaction, and then parallels in what we’re doing.
“People ask me with Jaguar how you can completely break production, take a new concept, double the price point and increase the volume.
“We’ve already done it. We did exactly that with Defender. We took an icon that was cherished and we reimagined it. Most people would say it’s an authentic Defender. It does what a Defender should do.
“It operates at a completely different price point and we’ve tripled the volume and doubled the price point. We’re not looking to triple the Jaguar volume, but it’s an indication that these things can be done.”
