“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,” he said. “The design teams, the engineering teams – everybody’s been involved in getting it this far.”
Returning to enthusiasts, Glover is frustrated that “messages get filtered” and about the sentiment that this new Jaguar is not for those who have loved and bought into the brand to date.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
Are there comparisons with how JLR reinvented the Land Rover Defender and upset the purists? “It’s definitely a good parallel,” said Glover. “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.”