Gerry McGovern to oversee Land Rover and Jaguar brands

News broke unofficially on November 9th 2020, that long-standing Land Rover’s chief creative officer Gerry McGovern will now be responsible for both Land Rover and Jaguar brands as chief creative officer (CCO) for the whole JLR group. As McGovern moves up, so too does Land Rover’s former creative director Massimo Frascella to become the 4x4 marque’s design director, thus creating parity with Julian Thomson’s role as Jaguar’s design director. Both now report to McGovern.

Car Design News confirmed the news via a high-level spokesperson at JLR. As to why the change has been made now, no official details have been divulged as yet, but it is surely related to the summer announcement of new JLR CEO Thierry Bolloré (taking over from Ralf Speth). Bolloré’s role became effective on September 10th and he is on record as a very keen advocate of design.

It’s a big, but logical move for the McGovern who turned 64 in September and whose current stint at Land Rover started in 2004. Since then he’s masterminded the top-selling 2011 Range Rover Evoque, 2012 Range Rover mk4, 2013 Range Rover Sport mk2, 2017 Velar and 2019 new Defender. He also worked for the brand in the 1980s and ’90s when part of the Rover Group, most famously designing the highly-successful 1997 Land Rover Freelander.

McGovern’s newly-created JLR chief creative officer role would surely not have been possible 18 months ago when Ian Callum was still in charge of Jaguar design though. It’s no secret the pair did not see eye-to-eye on many things and it is highly unlikely Callum would have accepted reporting to McGovern given their similar age, stature and seniority levels at each marque.

The situation should be different with current design director Julian Thomson, 59. He only took the top Jaguar design job in 2019 when Callum left and although Thomson was Callum’s right-hand man for almost all of the former design director’s 20-year tenure at Jaguar there was also a period in 2006 when Thomson worked for both Callum and McGovern as advanced design director. The acclaimed 2008 Land Rover LRX concept was developed under Thomson’s watch and morphed into the production Range Rover Evoque through McGovern’s careful stewardship with little exterior change – becoming a financial game-changer for the company in the process. In an interview late last year Thomson acknowledged the old Callum vs. McGovern tensions but says he’s different: “Even though I’ve been here a long time I’m new to this role so I do listen to Gerry. We have a slightly softer attitude to running a team at Jaguar than Land Rover. There are different philosophies but we can learn from each other.”

It seems highly likely that McGovern’s new CCO role will take on all elements of design within JLR – well beyond the cars themselves to wider brand strategies for exhibition stands, accessories and even brochures – just like the role J Mays had at Ford and Marek Reichman currently holds at Aston Martin. Given the unofficial nature of the news breaking it will no doubt be awhile before McGovern himself speaks, but his quote from CDN’s Car Design Review 3 from a few years back could still be instructive. “When I started out all I wanted to do was draw cars, but you get more respect from the business if you show your ability to understand the bigger picture. That you have the opportunity to show the business, ‘well actually I understand the business environment, I know what the investment levels are, therefore I think these are the types of products we should doing’. As opposed to, ‘Well this is just a great design, I think we should be doing it’.”

Look out for more on this story at CDN in the coming months.