JLR Confident In Spinning Off Discovery As Its Own Brand Despite Slow Sales

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In case you missed the big news, Jaguar Land Rover is gone now in favor of a new identity called JLR. Beneath that identity are four sub brands including Discovery as its own entity. That might sound strange considering its slow-ish sales of late but executives at the brand are confident about its future.

For those out there counting, that’s three brands that descended directly from Land Rover. Defender and Range Rover are both doing quite well but Discover has had a rougher go of it lately. From March of 2022 through the same month this year, it sold just over 12,000 Discos.

Despite that, marketing boss Anthony Bradbury tells Autocar that the Discovery brand is the “we brand” and “an enabler to make every day exceptional.” How exactly Discovery is going to accomplish that feat is still up in the air. Bradbury says that JLR is in the planning stages.

Read: Jaguar Land Rover Becomes JLR As Company Puts Focus On Its Four Brands

“What we’re going through now is understanding how we reimagine the Discovery brand. What space will it fill? How does it fill a space that’s unique to the other brands? That is the kind of internal work that we’re going through now in terms of that assessment.” 

He’s not ignoring the workload ahead though. Clearly, Discovery has a lot to do if it’s going to catch up to its fellow JLR brands. “Of the four brands, it’s the one that, in terms of its future state, there’s the most work to do [on] internally,” he said. “But that’s massively exciting, because, certainly in our view, it’s got enormous potential to grow.”

As for the model’s poor sales in recent years, Bradbury reasoned on it saying “You can’t take that too literally as an indication of demand… We were very constrained in what we could build.” The chip shortage is easing and that should allow for increased production in the process.

Company executives have to promote their brand by definition so it’s not unusual to see all of these buzzwords thrown around. At the end of the day, Discovery will need to move units to prove that this was the right move. At the same time, splitting it off on its own seems to indicate a high degree of confidence for now.