Jaguar Land Rover Designer Behind Woke Rebrand “Escorted From Office”
The designer behind Jaguar’s controversial woke rebrand has reportedly been dismissed and “escorted from the office” just days after a new Chief Executive took over. The Telegraph has more.
Gerry McGovern, who was formerly Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) chief creative officer, was told he was being dismissed with immediate effect on Monday.
He was then escorted out of the office, according to reports, although details of his exit remain unclear.
JLR, which is owned by Indian conglomerate Tata, declined to comment.
The turmoil comes just days after PB Balaji, the former finance boss of Tata Motors, succeeded Adrian Mardell as chief executive of JLR.
It brings an abrupt end to Mr McGovern’s 21-year career at the carmaker, where he masterminded a revamp of Land Rover’s Defender model and the company’s line-up of Range Rovers.
He was also the main creative force behind last year’s radical rebrand of Jaguar that aimed to shift the marque away from its traditional ‘Jag Man’ image towards ultra-wealthy customers.
It invited unflattering comparisons to the FAB 1 car driven by Lady Penelope in Thunderbirds and Barbie’s screaming pink convertible.
An advert for the rebrand, featuring a cast of androgynous-looking models but no cars, was also criticised for being too ‘woke’, with Nigel Farage and Donald Trump among those who attacked the campaign.
The backlash was dismissed as “vile hatred and intolerance” at the time by Rawdon Glover, the Managing Director of the Jaguar brand.
“We need to re-establish our brand and at a completely different price point so we need to act differently,” he told the Financial Times.
But Mr Mardell, the JLR boss who oversaw the rebrand strategy, announced his retirement in August before leaving in November.
JLR has insisted Mr Mardell’s retirement was unrelated to the Jaguar rebrand.
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If I’m honest, it seems to me as if pretty much everything Jaguar was doing in this respect was right on the money EXCEPT pushing it too far with trans, asexual weird looking people in the ad. If they’d not gone that far, it probably would have been fine.
Going all electric is the death sentence for Jaguar. It will go bust less than three years from when they start selling cars again.
EVs is a very competitive market to be entering at the same time as alienating your traditional market and completely rebranding. ‘Copy Nothing’ could potentially deliver interesting results but is less likely to be commercially viable.
B-b-but woke is manufactured and driven by white women, so says the DS Misogynist Society.🧐 Oops….🤭 Reality inconveniently refutes your assertion. Again.🤷♀️
Unfortunately, no amount of denial from you will change reality. On average, women are more willing to suppress science for moral reasons, and men are more willing to allow offensive or even potentially harmful ideas to be shared. There’s already support for including moral and harm concerns into the scientific and publishing process is, and support for academic freedom is likely to decline. Women also account for 80% of gender studies graduates in the U.S., which are essentially activism boot camps in radical gender ideology. These are the women disproportionately likely to end up as DEI administrators in universities, and to be in a position to enforce the illiberal tendencies they sharpened in university. Thus, women in higher education are more likely than men to 1) believe hate speech is a form of violence 2) endorse shutting down a speaker 3) defer to Indigenous ways of knowing as equal in value to science 4) approve censure of scientific findings if they conflict with woke doctrine, and 5) claim it should be illegal to say offensive things about certain minorities. Society, particularly women, has been good at recognising the harms that come from the excesses of masculinity. We haven’t even begun… Read more »
The only people I see that are in denial are misogynists who are so wedded to their narrative that they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge any facts which contradict their worldview: that women are to blame for all things, including the bad behaviour and poor decision making of men. That’s confirmation bias on steroids and textbook denialism. What you’ve failed to do in your above word salad is acknowledge the fact that women are in fact individuals, with individual traits, behaviours and opinions, as are men. You have to fall back on sweeping generalisations because that’s the only way you can support your theory. And I note not a single reference for your claims. Or did you copy those straight from a Helen ( “Pick me!” ) Andrews speech?🤔 I don’t deal in theories, I deal in real world evidence and facts, being quite the realist that I am. So tell me this, because it seems to me YOU’RE the denialst who is missing the point: How does any of what you’ve just said relate to the above article about JLR? I’m not the sort of person to point the finger of blame at an entire sex and scapegoat them,… Read more »
All quiet on the Western front, eh? What, still no explanation as to how the gargantuan woke debacle at Jaguar was the fault of women? 🤔 You do surprise me.🤭
Here, let me help focus your mind before you go off piste again. I hold no truck with whataboutary and deflection is the refuge of those who have bugger all to offer in the way of a counter argument;
Gerry McGovern
Rawdon Glover
PB Balaji
Mr Mardell
What do all of these men have in common? Correct. They’re not women.🤣 What’s that you were saying about “denial”?
Oh my, looks like a fair few egos have been fractured as a result of my inconvenient truth bombs. I guess the bubble of delusion in which you surround yourselves isn’t as robust as you think. Sucks to be you.🤡😄
Oh dear, there goes Mogs, offending the terminally triggered by saying the quiet part out loud yet again. How are you supposed to blame women when what we’ve got here is a male CEO and a male chief designer who royally ballsed things up at JLR?😬 Cripes! The ‘truth’ isn’t truthing!😁
I’d maybe think about popping a Valium and finding a safe space to go decompress…Here’s your dummies, though. I even ran them under the tap and everything.👶 YW.😊
“Everything work turns to shit” – Donald Trump, August 21 2021
Assume you meant ‘woke’, but you are often right with work! ☺️
Ah yes, auto correction…!
Sounds like the case of a new broom wanting to choose his own top team – fair enough. I am sure this bloke got a decent payout. I’ve got little sympathy with people who choose to push “trans” stuff – on the other hand, this bloke’s boss Mardell who “retired” will have signed off on it and indeed this bloke who has been sacked may just have been following orders from Mardell or Rawdon “vile hatred and intolerance” Glover.
“Go Woke, G…”
You know the rest…
And who is in the driving seat?
Fools (male, female, whatever)
Precisely. Fools, woketards, globalists, Socialists, Marxists, you name it. They’re all available in both sexes. Only the wilfully blind would argue otherwise. Psst 🤫…I think there’s a fair amount of the latter about.👀
Imagine being such a hardcore denialist you get triggered by facts that don’t support the stories you tell yourselves…That women are always to be blamed, even when it’s men who have demonstrably made a cock-up. Diddums. I’m so bummed for you. 😭😏
“Gerry McGovern, who was formerly Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) chief creative officer…”
Chief destructive officer – more like.
Exactly. But Mr McGovern can’t possibly be held responsible for his actions and poor decision-making. Not when there’s a cleaning lady on the premises who can be scapegoated.😁
If Jaguar had just presented the car as a ‘concept’ they could have used the feedback to ‘tune’ their ideas. Associating it with a social faction and leaving the car out meant that they would immediately upset a lot of their existing customers without guaranteeing a replacement set of customers. Not good business practice.
But was the problem the car designs or the bizarre marketing and ad campaign?
Both…. Look at it…. It’s hideous! Like a cartoon car a kid would draw
The last word in pink cars has to be Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward’s Rolls Royce, though the Pink Panther’s car was pretty cool too.
It’s almost like they copied both those!
Lady P and Parker were certainly not woke, and neither was the Pink Panther
The cartoon comment earlier made me think of Penelope Pitstop from The Wacky Races whose pink car is called the Compact Pussycat. They don’t make them like that anymore.
Knowing Lady Ps full name suggests you are a superfan . Gerry’s creation really has held up well and are always watchable. Do you like Four Feather Falls too, I do.
Her and Parker are my favourite characters. Loved her accent.
Don’t know about being a super fan as I’ve not seen the one you mention- other than I think Space 1999 I am too young to have seen anything other than repeats and I don’t think the one you mention was repeated.
Overall Captain Scarlet was my favourite series of the ones I know though I did enjoy UFO which was filmed not far from where I grew up and my friend lived next door to Ed Bishop in Hurst Park.
Was the JLR car in question only available in pink??
I might wear that colour on my toenails but nowhere else!
I’m not even sure it was a real car or at least not a production model – I think they call them “concept cars”
Almost ready for production now I heard recently…
I like big windows in my cars, and being high up. If I lived in the USA with big parking spaces and wide roads I think I would like a pickup. Anyway isn’t it all-electric? I would not buy an electric car.
It’s not boring, like most cars, at least in my very car-uninterested opinion.
I wouldn’t buy it. But I wouldn’t mind seeing the occasional one around. And I’m assuming they have other colours and this is the one that fitted in best with their mad campaign, the most provocative.
It’s certainly that – my main problem was they decided to discount all their history and brand loyal customers… why would you do that? It’s totally unnecessary… unfortuently cars are a volume business, so you have to appeal to at least a reasonable number of people
The spirit of a great model range derives from great product design not the marketing department specifying vibrating massage seats and copious lub’ service intervals.
I think it depends on the type of person you are and what you want from a car. I drive a humdrum Škoda and am very fond of the heated seats and steering wheel – when I come to buy another one I will be looking for those features and would be even happier if the seats also gave me a massage.
I guess Jaguar are aiming at a different target market.
Perhaps you didn’t glean my vulgar inferences. I don’t think Skoda are offering the self lubricating option just yet.
Lol. Sorry – slow on the uptake!
All they had to do was bring back Jaguar MkII and E type. Worked with Fiat and their updated 500.
Another great British company sold to a foreign country. I despair 🙁