Etude du commerce des voiture Jaguar Land Rover (document en anglais).

Jaguar Land Rover: a marketing analysis of Britain’s fastest growing car manufacturer

Word count: 2991 words

Table of contents

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………….3

I. The Micro-Marketing Environment…………………………………………………………4

1. The company………………………………………………………………………………….4

2. The customers………………………………………………………………………………..5

3. The suppliers………………………………………………………………………………….5

4. The competitors……………………………………………………………………………..6

II. The Macro-Marketing Environment……………………………………………………….9

1. The Political/Legal/Environmental factors………………………………………9

2. The Social/Economical factors………………………………………………………...9

3. The Technological factors……………………………………………………………...10

III. The Marketing Mix

1. Product…………………………………………………………………………………………11

2. Place…………………………………………………………………………………………….11

3. Promotion…………………………………………………………………………………….12

4. Price……………………………………………………………………………………………..12

IV. Critical Success Factors……………………………………………………………………….13

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………….14

Introduction

Jaguar Land Rover is a major actor of the premium/luxury car market, and has performed extremely well over the last years with a 90% increase in turnover since 2010 (JLR, 2013), and an explosion of profit margin (+1325%) on the same period (JLR, 2013). This market was hardly injured by the economic and financial crisis of 2008, and took several years to recover. However in the UK, it already rose again to its pre-2008 level. It is composed of several brands European (mostly German) and American and Japanese on overseas markets. It has experienced a better recovery than the general automotive market (SMMT, 2013), helped by the recent explosion of the number of billionaires in emerging countries (Forbes, 2011; 2013). Also in domestic markets like the UK, wealthy customers were more than willing to pay the price for quality despite the crisis.

I. The Micro Marketing Environment

The Micro-Marketing Environment of a company consists in all the organisations “affecting the company’s ability to serve its customer” (Kotler and Armstrong, 2013) but on which the company has some control. I would like to analyse more deeply the company itself, its suppliers, its customers and its competitors, as these are the entities affecting most the company.

From Kotler and Armstrong, 2013

1. The company

Jaguar appeared in 1922 under the name of Swallow Sidecar Company or SSC. It took the name of Jaguar after World War II to avoid any reminder of the German SS. It was nationalised in 1966 and privatised in 1984 by Margaret Thatcher’s government, and then bought in 1990 by Ford Motors (Jaguar Cars Ltd, 2009).

Land Rover was created in 1947, by the now disappeared Rover brand. It was initially the British response to the Jeep used by the American forces during World War II. The Land Rover was a robust car, with all-wheel drive system and made of aluminium because of the steel penury (Chapman, 2009). It belonged to Rover until it 1994 when it was sold to BMW, and then was bought in 2000 by Ford. It was then the first time the two brands were in the same group, and we saw the first synergies.

In 2008, both brands were performing well, but required a lot of future investments that Ford could not afford. They were put on sale and on March 26, 2008, the Indian conglomerate Tata acquired the “package” for £ 1.2bn (Thomson Reuters, 2008). Both brands merged, and Jaguar Land Rover PLC was born.

2. The customers

2012 has seen JLR winning an important award from the firm JD Power that conducted a survey that put Jaguar 1st and Land Rover in top 10 regarding quality and customer satisfaction (JD Power, 2013). In 2008, the same survey was putting Jaguar 12th and Land Rover 34th, with really severe comments regarding a lack of quality for a premium manufacturer: the strong brand image of both Jaguar and Land Rover was not sufficient enough to balance the quality failures. JLR’s most recent products – smaller, cheaper to buy and to run – aim to lower the average age of buyer, since the average age of owners are 47 for Jaguar and 40 for Land Rover (Tescocompare, 2013).

3. The suppliers

At this time, it was pointed out that this lack of quality was due to a high rate of failure in some components and quality control was outsourced to 16 different suppliers (JD Power, 2013).

These 16 different suppliers were reduced to only one with the signature of a strong partnership, winner of the “Best Supplier Relationship” award in the CIPS Supply Management Awards 2013, with the firm Gobel & Partner (Gobel & Partner, 2013). This enabled JLR to highly improve the quality of its products and the management

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