Jaguar Magazine 02/2017 – American English

The
Foreword
JAGUAR CUSTOMER INSIGHTS SENIOR MANAGER ANA RAMIREZ
ON LISTENING TO THE MOST IMPORTANT VOICE OF ALL: YOURS
It’s always a hugely important, exciting
moment when we reveal a new car to our
customers – especially when it’s as groundbreaking
as the new Jaguar E-PACE. But in
fact our customers helped us make the E-PACE,
just as they help us make every new Jaguar.
I work in our Customer
Insights team at Jaguar, and
our mission is to bring our
customers’ voices into the
creative heart of our business.
To do this, we try to see the
big picture. We look at trends
in the world at large to help us
anticipate the kind of vehicles
you’ll want, perhaps before
you know you want them.
We use that research to
plan how the Jaguar brand
should develop, and identify
the type of vehicles we should
be building. That’s what led us
to make Jaguar’s first crossover,
the Jaguar F-PACE. We
know that sales of crossovers
and SUVs have more than doubled in the last five
years, now accounting for a quarter of the cars
sold each year around the globe – with compact
crossovers like the E-PACE showing particularly
rapid growth. So it’s right that Jaguar should
have a strong presence in this exciting market.
And of course we talk to you directly.
We invite our current customers and those we’d
like to win over to come and look at our early
design studies – in secret, of course. We ask you
to walk around the cars and rate them, and then
we’ll talk to you in more detail to really understand
your responses. We even come to you.
We do ethnographic research projects where we
immerse ourselves in the lives of our customers
and potential customers. We visit you at home
and observe how you live and how you use
your vehicles. We even film it. It might sound a
little intrusive but our participants are always
incredibly willing. They’re excited to know that
they’ll help us build a new Jaguar.
We see the same enthusiasm from our
designers and engineers, too. Design Director
Ian Callum and his team are very engaged in
our work and are always interested to learn more
about our results. Building a new Jaguar in this
way becomes a truly enriching experience for
everyone involved. At the end of the day, though,
the voice that matters the most is yours.
Here’s an example of how you help make a
difference: The research we did when we were
first considering the F-PACE suggested that a
Jaguar crossover would be so popular that we
ought to create two. But we also learned that
our customers wanted a smaller ‘cub’ Jaguar
crossover to have its own personality, one
that could set it apart from the bigger F-PACE.
And when we researched the options for the
design of the E-PACE we found that the more
vertical headlamp design – closer to that of the
F-TYPE than the F-PACE – was more popular.
So that’s the design you’ll see on the car we
reveal in these pages.
We’re very proud of it. Our research makes
us pretty sure you’ll like it. And we’d like to thank
you for your help in making it.
Ana Ramirez
Senior Manager, Customer Insights
PHOTOGRAPHY: JON CARDWELL
6 THE JAGUAR