The voice of the customer (VOC) is the driving force behind Quality Function Deployment (QFD), and it sets the direction for a company to improve its products, satisfy its customers, and respond to the competition (Goetsch & Davis, 2021, p. 290). There are many ways this can go wrong. For example, the individuals comprising the VOC may be in conflict - whis is addressed by Xiao & Wang (2024). Another way is that the VOC is misrepresented - this is described in another post on this blog. A third way this can go wrong is when a company completely ignores the VOC, when the vox populi is not the vox Dei.
For this post I was going to write about the process by which the U.S. military decided to use the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) in Iraq. Insurgents soon learned that the HMMWV and other vehicles were vulnerable from below to Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). U.S. troops modified the HMMWVs and other vehicles to improve survivability by adding sandbags to the floor (Haji sandbags) and welding scrap metal to the bottom. We don’t know whether the QFD process was used in choosing the HMMWV, but the VOC certainly did not include input from anyone with experience in asymmetric warfare, where attack from unexpected directions is a rudimentary and fundamental tactic.
Beyond that one observation, For now, I have nothing more to write on that subject, but there are numerous other examples where the VOC is minimized or misinterpreted. I do have something to write about a more recent example where the VOC was completely ignored...
Consider the 2024 “Copy Nothing” advertising campaign for Jaguar Cars (Jaguar, 2024). This campaign was launched on 19 November 2024 to announce their conversion to an all-electric brand. This conversion was not mentioned in the ad itself, nor was the fact that the ad was even for an automotive manufacturer until the word “Jaguar” appeared at the very end, in a new font and without the stylized image of a leaping jaguar that used to be their logo.
Instead, the advertisement begins with elevator doors opening onto a barren wasteland of a set. Stepping from the elevator are various stunning and brave gender-ambiguous runway models each feigning purposefulness but are really just displaying a mixture of smugness and boredom. Next, there are scenes of the models alongside the phrases “create exuberant,” “live vivid,” “delete ordinary,” “break moulds,” and “copy nothing.” The models then walk out of frame and the name of the brand is finally revealed.
The soundtrack to all this has a heavy beat, which represents the heartbeats of Jaguar stockholders as they experience cardiac arrest upon watching this ad.
Immediately, the advertisement became more popular than the Jaguar car brand itself, and indeed it became an embarrassment to Jaguar. Talk show hosts lampooned it, it was roasted on social media, and people used AI to add a jaguar back into the commercial – with the jaguar attacking the models! (Sunrise Video, 2024)
The traditional customer base of Jaguar consisted of people going for the “James Bond aesthetic.” Even when attempting to attract new customers, existing customers must not be forgotten – they are still customers, and their voices must be part of the VOC. The “Copy Nothing” ad campaign went further: Jaguar not only ignored the traditional base but seemed to reject them. This is verified in an interview with Rawdon Glover, managing director of the automaker, who stated that “We need to re-establish our brand and at a completely different price point so we need to act differently. We wanted to move away from traditional automotive stereotypes” (Brady, 2024).
Jaguar sales dropped 97.5% in Europe following the rebrand (Singh, 2025). The automaker cut 500 management jobs in the United Kingdom, and Adrian Mardell, the CEO of Jaguar’s parent company JLR, will be retiring at the end of this year (Creed, 2025).
It is not clear why some corporations ignore the VOC. Kolarska & Aldrich (1980) note that managers and leaders can become highly unresponsive when a company is in decline, and one of the reasons for this is that formally loyal customers have switched brands (“exited”). In that case, the VOC itself is harder to interpret because there are fewer customers, so the “smoothing” approach taken in Xiao & Wang (2024) is less effective in arriving at consensus.
Research by Xueming (2007) has shown that customer negative voice in the form of complaint records hurts a company’ stock price and concludes that “investments in reducing consumer negative voice could indeed make financial sense in terms of promoting firm-idiosyncratic stock returns.” This should come as no surprise.
Neither of these reasons – declining customer base or unhappy customer base – is enough to explain why Jaguar approved the “Copy Nothing” ad campaign. Further, the experiences of other brands that “went woke,” such as Bud Light’s 2023 partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, provide direct evidence that nothing good can come from Jaguar’s style of rebranding. One must therefore conclude that their actions were nothing other than corporate suicide.
References
Brady, J. (2024, 23 November). Jaguar boss hits out at 'vile hatred and intolerance' after car fans turned on firm's widely-ridiculed woke rebrand. Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14117385/jaguar-boss.html
Creed, S. (2025, 1 August). On the move: Jaguar Land Rover boss behind ‘woke’ pink rebrand to quit after campaign saw carmaker universally panned. The Sun. https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/36107702/jaguar-land-rover-boss-quits-woke-rebrand-backlash/
Goetsch, D. L. & Davis, S. B. (2021). Quality management for organizational excellence: Introduction to total quality (9th ed.). Pearson.
Jaguar. (2024, 19 November). Jaguar | Copy nothing [Video]. You Tube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLtFIrqhfng
Kolarska, L. & Aldrich, H. (1980). Exit, voice, and silence: Consumers' and managers' responses to organizational decline. Organizational Studies 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/017084068000100104
Singh, E. (2025, 3 July). Woke woe: Jaguar sales plummet 97.5% after fierce backlash over woke pink ‘rebrand’ that left fans slamming ‘nonsense’ EV. The Sun. https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/35669921/jaguar-sales-plummet-woke-pink-backlash/
Sunrise Video. (2024, 30 November). New Jaguar commercial part 2 [Video]. You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9awWSN-h1es
Xiao, J. & Wang, X. (2024). An optimization method for handling incomplete and conflicting opinions in quality function deployment based on consistency and consensus reaching process. Computers and Industrial Engineering 183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cie.2023.109779
Xueming, L. (2007). Consumer negative voice and firm-idiosyncratic stock returns. Journal of Marketing 71(3). https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.71.3.075
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