The Best Way to Get to Know Your Customers. Hint: Not AI.

I was reading through The Globe and Mail and found a rather curious headline:

“The demise of Jaguar is a sad reality for anyone who loves cars.”

I’m not the biggest car enthusiast, but I read through the opinion piece.

Turns out that Jaguar will axe all of its current models of cars and switch to electric-only vehicles. The new generation of vehicles will be sold exclusively through dealers, bucking an apparent wider trend of selling direct.

Also, the leaping jaguar as the logo is no more. The cat will now retire into it’s ninth life.

It feels like a very odd move to make, so I wanted to read more about the history of the Jaguar brands.

What stood out for me was the brand’s ownership history. The company that would become Jaguar was founded in 1922. Then, they made a car with a Jaguar in the name in 1935.

The company morphed into “Jaguar Cars” in 1945. It was then nationalized by the British government, became its own company again in 1984, bought by Ford in 1990 and then bought (along with Land Rover) by Tata Motors in 2008.

Whew.

With those types of changes of ownership, you might imagine that the brand would have an identity crisis.

Just ask Joe Eberhardt, Jaguar-Land Rover’s North American President & CEO.

“There does come a point where you just need to focus on the future. It may not be a brand for everybody, and that’s by design. Clearly given the positioning of the brand and the vehicles we will lose some clients along the way. It’s a difficult decision to make, but brands need to be focused and to decide what their purpose is.”

And to decide on one’s purpose, means to know one’s self.

There is much discussion about getting to know your customers better, the cacophony of companies saying they are “customer-centric” and how AI will help pull insights from customer data.

But, let’s consider the flip side: How well do brands know themselves?

Is there such thing as being “company-centric” or “brand-centric” as a business strategy?

To what extent do companies ensure that all employees are keenly aware of what their brand is all about?

I wonder.

If a brand doesn’t know itself well, it shows.

Product assortments get out of control and there is no clear brand point of view.

So, if brands really want to get to know their customers better, they need to do the “internal work” to get to know themselves better first.