Bad Marketing Decisions

Given that Ford is slowly imploding, I thought I'd take a quick look at how Ford got themselves into their current spot.

Part of what inspired me to write this was a rolling bit of irony that I spotted driving home this morning. At a stop light, a little Mercury Cougar rolled up alongside me. All over the back windows and the rear glass were some very elegant looking Mary Kay logos. On a dark gray car, the near luminous pink of the logos really stood out to good effect. Sitting in the driver's seat was possibly the hairiest man I've seen in a long time. Thick black hair, bushy eyebrows and a beard that was so dense a lawn mower would be needed to shave it. (It was trim enough, just extremely thick) I'm sure he was driving his wife's car, but I couldn't overlook the juxtaposition.

Anyhow, that brings me to a parade of marketing errors that Ford has made in the last number of years.

Consider:

1) Killing the Mercury brand. This was a huge error, and one that started in the late 1970s, when Ford started insisting that the Mercury be little more than a rebadged Ford. At that point, Ford started to compete with itself.

2) A series of "misfires" in launching new models:

a. The Ford Contour/Mercury Mystique - built on the Ford of Europe Mondeo frame, these were a rather nice mid-size car, and probably had the best road manners of any mid-90s Ford product. Nice car, but Ford priced it almost identically to the Ford Taurus, which they sold heavily in the fleet market (rentals, etc).

Sadly, Ford completely blew the marketing of the Contour. They under-marketed the car, and it languished in the shadow of the horrendously awful boat called the Taurus. Had Ford quietly placed the Taurus on "hiatus", the Contour would have done much better - as it was ideally positioned to compete with Honda's Accord or Toyota's Camry.

b. The Ford Focus. Another Ford of Europe design - and actually a whole lot of fun to drive. The first year they sold it, Ford did a nice job of marketing the thing, and then they let it languish in obscurity. Aside from the "SVT" version a couple of years ago, they've done little to hype the Focus, and a series of production changes cheapened the interior of the car to make it a pale imitator of its Japanese-built competitors like the Toyota Corolla.

Yet another case of under-marketing of the product, in favour of oversized, overweight SUV and large car offerings.

c. The Ford Taurus. Although innovative in the late 1980s when the Taurus made its debut, by the mid-90s it was a wallowing monster vastly outclassed by its competitors. Its popularity with the "fleet" market meant a lot of them are to be had for cheap today, but with a mediocre reliability record, and handling that is sub-par, even compared to the LTD of the mid-70s they would have done everybody a favor by terminating this model around 1995. (A series of problems like biodegradable transmissions didn't help the model)

d. SUV's. Take a look at Ford's website - nearly half of their offerings are SUVs and trucks - the "Bigger is Better" type. Yes, through the 1990s, they sold huge numbers of Explorers and F150s, but they all but dropped the "small body" offerings - the Explorer grew to nearly the size of an 1980s F150, and the trucks just got huge.

The Ford Escape (aka Mazda Tribute) was a nice little "small body" offering, but once again, Ford priced it so that they were competing with themselves. The Escape's pricing overlapped heavily with the bigger Explorer, and the Escape was an "urban SUV" - AWD meant to compensate for bad urban conditions. The Explorer was seen by most purchasers as "more robust".

e. Mercury Cougar. Based on the Contour chassis, this was a really slick looking little car when it came out - lots of sharp lines and graceful curves. The driving experience was apparently comparable to the Toyota Celica, but a bit more gentle. They had a car that was flashy, a decent ride to drive. It would have competed quite nicely with the Accord Coupe, and the Toyota Celica. Again, Ford's marketing department went underground. After an initial burst of 'launch' advertising, they did basically nothing to promote the car. By 2002, when I went looking for my current car, Ford dealers were just about denying that they had the Cougar in the lineup. (Which is primarily why I didn't buy it - knowing that they are going to kill it off, I was worried about parts availability and service)

f. Ford Fusion. When I saw this thing, I thought "Bleah! They've done another Granada") The styling is boring beyond belief, and it looks ponderous, rather than light and agile. It sort of embodies all of the worst attributes of Ford's designs from the 1990s, just shrinks them a little. Even more distressing is the fact that they are still selling the Taurus in the same pricing bracket.

g. Ford Windstar. Intended to replace an amazingly successful Mercury Villager/Nissan Quest joint venture vehicle, this lumbering error shared far too many parts with the Ford Taurus, and suffered similarly with poor handling, mediocre reliability and disappointing design. Unlike the innovative Villager, the Windstar wound up looking cheap. Worn soapbar styling and horrid seating that was neither "plush" nor supportive left the impression that Ford's design team built this thing using the "built by the lowest bidder model". The transmissions on Windstars are notorious for having the "sun gear" fall off its shaft - a rather catastrophic failure, to say the least)

After a couple of years of anemic marketing, Ford appeared to give up on the Windstar and has been trying to dump the remaining stock. (Granted, I'm not at all sure that any marketing could have saved this wretched vehicle)

3. Near incompetence in the dealer network.

My experiences with Ford service have been near disasters. It took them three tries to get the correct seat belt parts in for my Ranger a few years ago. A close friend had a Mercury Villager that started having problems with oxygen sensors getting cooked alive, and the Ford dealer couldn't diagnose that correctly to save their lives.

Along with a not so memorable experience getting a thermostat replaced on an Escort in the early '90s (3 trips to replace a $2.50 piece of brass and spring steel!) because the nitwits kept testing the in-car heater, not the the engine thermostat - I eventually had to tell the dealer what was to be replaced.

4. Two model marketing.

Somewhere along the way, Ford seems to have decided that their buyers want two kinds of car - either a Mustang or a F150 truck. Everything else has been let languish in the model lines. This is a huge mistake, because it means that Ford has been unable to position itself as a company with offerings that are looking forward. The image of them has become that of a company that builds gas guzzling monsters with mediocre reliability.

They made a couple of "muscle car" retro attempts - bringing back the "Mercury Marauder" name for a year or two, but really not much else, certainly nothing that I could call "aggressive". While Chrysler was carving out a neat little niche market for themselves selling "image" cars, and GM has been successfully reinventing their line, Ford seems to have been floundering with mediocrity and a lack of focus.


Needless to say, Ford has a long hill to climb before they will restore themselves to their past "glory". I think they can do it, but they desperately need to shed some truly awful products and bring out some new product that is competitive. They have a good start in platforms like the Focus, but they need to spend some serious effort rejuvenating the product. Additionally, a track record of dubious quality means that they need to spend some serious time building confidence up. (No more Windstars, please!) Back in the '70s, Ford had a very aggressive "Quality is Job 1" campaign internally and externally. Now would be a good time to resurrect that effort which seems to have been long ago waylaid.

In the meantime, Ford plants will close and the communities around them will suffer the consequences.