Operationalising luxury in the premium automotive industry

This thesis presents an Action Research project investigating the use of customers’ perceptions of premium and luxury cars within the premium automotive industry. The research was sponsored by Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), a UK-based automotive manufacturer. An inductive, phenomenological approach was adopted in which JLR’s Premiumness Research Programme (PRP) was used as a case study to build an understanding of the consumer’s perception of luxury, to discover how to communicate this understanding within the business, and to determine how it could be integrated into the NPD process. A passive exploratory study was conducted to understand JLR’s PRP work, to seek new insights about the nature of customer’s reactions when evaluating luxury and premium cars, and to assess JLR’s approach in conducting the PRP. An interventionist descriptive study was conducted to probe for deeper insights into how successful JLR’s research and dissemination process had been within the company, to establish how the wider NPD community interacted with the data, and to develop and test new ideas and tools that enhanced the utility and accessibility of the PRP data. The research generated 58 Research Observations and 36 individual insights that challenged conventional wisdom about how the voice of the customer (VoC) can be captured and used in the NPD process. JLR’s PRP methodology was revealed as a powerful multi-method technique for acquiring data about consumers’ expectations of luxury automotive brands and products, their reactions when evaluating luxury and premium vehicles, and their emotional satisfaction with features and attributes of luxury and premium vehicles. Limitations in JLR’s ability to process and operationalise such data lead to the development of a Premiumness Verbatims Database tool which enabled the wider NPD community to access the PRP knowledge in a safe and meaningful way by considering the translation and utility of subjective VoC data.