Pedal to the floor: How Jaguar Land Rover uses insight to stay ahead

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The word ‘jaguar’ has a very good chance of bringing to mind the car rather than an Amazonian feline. Jaguar has been at the centre of the UK’s car industry for almost a century, and remains one of the country’s most recognisable automotive brands.

In 2013, Jaguar merged with fellow former British Leyland brand Land Rover, creating Jaguar Land Rover. The two remain separate brands within the same company, but both operate at the ‘prestige’ end of the car market. For both, identifying the typical driver is crucial. However, with a product as difficult to design and construct as a car, the process of identifying that typical driver is fraught with risk.

“The nature of the automotive industry is you can’t ‘turn on a sixpence’,” says Joanne Pearson, global customer insights director at Jaguar Land Rover. “The motor vehicle is the most complex consumer product you can buy, and they get more complex as they get more connected, with more safety features and automation, and the more legislation that they have to meet.

“The life cycles and development cycles of vehicles are many years – it is not like a fast-moving consumer good, where you can turn around from concept to being in store in weeks or months.”

Pearson heads Jaguar Land Rover’s customer insight globally, leading a team of 12 people based mainly in the UK, as well as North America and China. Her responsibility is to bring the voice of the customer into the company. Syndicated studies, common in the automotive industry and in some cases running for decades, are often used by Pearson’s team, and there is work with long-standing agency partners.

Jaguar Land Rover is currently implementing a new customer experience programme that will run in 84 markets across the world, with support from Ipsos and Medallia. The programme examines customer feedback to the buying process, considering how the company is performing and delivering customer experience. Between its launch in April and July 2021, the team analysed more than 100,000 customer responses.

Generally, there were more people satisfied than unsatisfied with the company’s performance, according to the research, and people who raised concerns or problems were identified and attempts were made to address these specific issues.

Pushing boundaries

As cars take years to develop, from concept to market, and each requires thousands of different elements, with multiple teams working independently of one another on the final product, Pearson says that it can be very difficult to research the needs and desires of future drivers. With Jaguar Land Rover there is an additional challenge, as it operates in the premium end of the market, which is competitive and financially out of reach for the average person.

Take the example of the latest Land Rover Defender, the most recent version of which was released in 2021 and appears in the James Bond movie No Time to Die, out this autumn. The research supporting the development of the Defender, carried out internally, began with identifying the ideal ‘target customer’. Pearson says that the target customer for a car is often someone who “might be driving a different car at the moment, but they fit the profile of who we are designing this car for”. This is honed down to a small group of drivers, or even an individual who is considered ‘the bullseye’ – the ideal buyer for the car.

For the Defender, research identified the target market as people who push the boundaries in life, have an eye for great design but who also want the car to be functional, are individual, seek out nature and are free spirits, according to Pearson.

Everyone working on the Defender was given details about the identified target driver’s attributes and asked to hold them in mind during development. The target customer was even named to increase familiarity. “We understand their lifestyle, what they want from the car, how they will use it, how the car fits into their lives and what’s really important to them,” says Pearson.

The customer insight team recruited potential buyers of the Defender to gather their views on the initial concept, and then again when a model of the car was ready. As with many similar projects, research participants were brought to a secure location to see life-size prototypes of the Defender under tight security with confidentiality agreements, and then asked to give their perspective on the car’s features.

Once the car has been developed, work then turns to the pricing and positioning of the vehicle on the market, considering the future driver and communications strategy. Pearson says the Defender’s ‘Capable of great things’ tagline came from the original target customer for the vehicle as identified by the research team in the initial stages of research supporting the car’s development. It specifically emerged from a phrase used by a participant in the team’s qualitative research into the Defender, and ended up being used throughout the rest of the research into the car and in its advertising.

“The tagline has a duality to it – it describes the vehicle but also describes the people who are going to drive it,” she explains. “People drive Land Rovers because the vehicle is unstoppable and they are unstoppable. People often buy vehicles because they are a reflection of them and their personality.”

Once a car like the Defender goes to market, the customer insight team will also conduct research with early buyers, finding out who they are, whether they matched the target customer, what they liked and what they did not rate. This information is used to inform further updates and new features.

Video is vital in bringing the customer voice into the design process, explains Pearson.

“We strongly believe in the power of seeing the customers, and we therefore produce a lot of video output – there are very few projects where we wouldn’t have a video to accompany it,” she says. “That’s very powerful – what can be said in a video clip can be very efficient for the people consuming it.”

Insight is also shared across the company through a customer insight portal, which allows colleagues to access research and set up alerts for when new material is published.

Not every part of the car is researched individually at Jaguar Land Rover, Pearson adds, with features such as tyres and lighting quite similar across different ranges, but the insights team focuses on features including entertainment systems and seat materials. “Each car has thousands of different components, and so there are a lot of people working on each vehicle,” Pearson states. “There are some components that are less customer- facing that might be in the vehicle for safety or sustainability, and then there are other parts that we could do with customer feedback on.”

Clear skies

The car industry is going through a period of flux, with sales of petrol vehicles due to be banned from 2030 in the UK, and many parts of the world planning to phase out the internal combustion engine in favour of greener alternatives.

“We are constantly monitoring how quickly consumers might want to transition from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles, what their expectations are, and what some of the challenges and barriers are that we can help with to aid the transition,” says Pearson.

“If you or I just thought about what we might be doing in five years’ time, what our lives might be like or what we might want from a category, it might be quite difficult to say. We need to deliver insights to help business decisions, but some of it is about an uncertain future.”

To examine some of the impacts of electrification on the company, Pearson’s team has been looking at whether people are willing to buy electric cars now or whether they want to go for plug-in hybrids first, which use both fossil fuels and electricity to reduce carbon output while not fully embracing carbon-free fuel.

The company already has fully electric vehicles, such as the Jaguar I-Pace, and Pearson’s team has undertaken some qualitative work into the triggers and barriers in the decision-making process behind moving to an electric vehicle, including issues such as a lack of charging facilities, and how to market it in a way that addresses customers’ concerns about electric cars.

Covid-19 has been a challenge, robbing the company of the ability to deploy user testing during the design and manufacturing process, mainly due to the need for complete secrecy about the product. While home ethnographies have opened people’s homes and cars using videos, and the company has used online surveys, not everything in the usual research cycle was possible while restrictions were in place.

Jaguar Land Rover’s research team did track how people were responding to the pandemic, and how this influenced attitudes to cars and buying behaviours. The company is also monitoring how long-term trends in other industries – such as pet ownership or staycations – could impact car usage and preferences.

“People have seen the car as a safe haven, and also as a release,” Pearson says. “In points of lockdown, customers told us they sat in the car, put some music on and explored the technology in the vehicle in a way they hadn’t done before, or gone out for a drive to get out of the house. When liberty and freedom are more constrained, people value their car more than ever.”

With a prestigious past behind it, the company is looking to the future with relative confidence. Future priorities for the insight function include examining the rapid changes occurring in the Chinese market, such as new fashions, competitors and changing expectations of luxury car brands; the customer experience and how technology is changing the way customers want to interact with companies; and Jaguar Land Rover’s appeal to Generation Z. The research team will be looking to keep the business on the road for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

This article was first published in the october 2021 issue of IMPACT.