Gerry McGovern, OBE’s surprise sacking from Jaguar Land Rover—with no comment from the car maker—must go down in history as one of the more shocking departures, up there with the Carlos Ghosn arrest or Lee Iacocca’s firing.
Autocar India theorizes it was over the Jaguar rebrand—not whether the resultant car will succeed, but the way things were handled internally.
We know new CEO PB Balaji took over on November 17. There was a leaked 2022 letter from 25–30 of JLR’s design team to McGovern protesting the outsourcing of the rebrand to Accenture Interactive. McGovern was escorted out from his job on December 2, which suggests things got very heated.
Although our position is that the Jaguar brand needs a radical rethink, a good rebrand should involve one’s internal team first, selling them on it, before anything external happens.
If there was a collaborative culture at Jaguar, then there is not much wrong with hiring externally for fresh viewpoints—as long as the internal team’s knowledge and input are honoured.
Reading between the lines, it seems this wasn’t the case and 25–30 of the team felt sidelined.
Autocar India notes that Accenture Interactive had acquired Spark44, a client–agency joint venture formed by JLR and agency partners with 250 employees, in 2021. There were rumours in 2020 that Spark44 was up for sale, originally in the German media after both JLR’s then-CEO Ralf Speth and Spark44 CEO and co-founder Ralf Specht left. At the time, the car company called the rumours ‘unfounded’.
Spark44 had been formed in 2011, and appeared to have originally enjoyed support internally, even winning the Land Rover account from major external agencies in 2015.
With the JV gone, one possibility is that Accenture Interactive was not as collaborative, imposing its own model on JLR.
The design team also criticized the visual aspects of the brand, calling it ‘too rounded and playful, which does not speak to us the feeling of “Exuberance”,’ and that it was generic.
JLR’s massive hack in October set back the release of the new Jaguar, a production model previewed by the Type 00 concept of 2024, carrying the rebrand. This had been planned for the fourth quarter of 2025.
Right now we wonder if this will be a case of the XJ40 again—a big car getting delayed due to external forces—or one of XJ41, the aborted F-type of the 1980s that saw the brief change multiple times and the programme ultimately axed. The electrified Jaguar XJ replacement was originally meant to be out in 2022, axed by former JLR CEO Thierry Bolloré. Leaked images of the cancelled J-Pace SUV showed that the original design direction of 2020s Jaguars was evolutionary, not really giving Jaguar a sufficient jolt and following a formula of chasing the German market leaders. A bolder direction was sought, and the 2024 preview sparked controversy and debate.