I’m confused. In my readings, it seems that Ford assembled a large team of people to make the “Edsel” a success. Customer survey groups were formed, extensive market surveys were done (they even hired several psychologists to help analyze the data). Yet, the Edsel car was a huge flop-Ford lost a ton of money on it. Plus, the car was only built for 3 model years.
The Mustang, on the other hand, was a huge success. It was promoted and designed by a small group of engineers and designers, headed by Lee Iococca. The Mustang was hugely profitable, as it was just a new body placed upon an existing chassis and drive train.
But I didn’t see where Ford did any fancy market analysis on this-it was mainly gut feeling of Iococca and his team.
Why was one effort so successful, and another such a failure. Was there something wrong in the way (that the Ford executives analyzed the market)?
Anecdotal evidence from my dad (who bought a brand new '58 Edsel) is that the lesson learned was that people responding to the surveys tended to say what they thought other people would want in a car, not what they themselves wanted.
The car itself had issues - the electric tansmission buttons were particularly buggy.
couple things:
- Marketing hyped it up as a “new kind of car” but it was the same large finned monstrosity that pretty much every other American car was at the time
- there wasn’t really any “room” between Mercury and Lincoln for another brand to fit into
It was called Edsel.
This!
An important point there – Edsel wasn’t just a model under the Ford brand name (as Mustang was, and is), it was an entire new line, and thus more comparable to Lincoln or Mercury. Thus, Ford put more resources into it (and it had to do that much better just to be seen as a break-even proposition).
Hiring Georgia O’Keefe to design the grill was a misstep.
The Edsel was ugly, the Mustang was beautiful.
A couple of things.
Marketers discovered long ago that customer surveys rarely indicate accurately that a product will be successful. It’s not just the Edsel. What people say they want and what they will buy are usually not the same thing.
Highly successful products, like the Mustang are usually the product of a single person’s vision. Products designed by committee are rarely successful.
The original Sony Walkman was not the result of surveys, committees, analysis, and so forth. Akio Morita, head of Sony at the time just decided one day that it would be cool to have a small portable music player. And they made it, essentially because he said so.
Same for many of Apple’s most successful products. Steve said build it.
The Mustang was the personal vision of Lee Iacocca, Same pattern.
The Edsel really did seem like it was designed by a marketing committee. It was an attempt to take over the large luxury car market, a market that had already reached it’s saturation point with the large Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Plymouths, etc. The market for these beasts was the WW2 generation.
The Edsel was too long, too heavy, too ugly, too everything. Ford was betting money on ideas that were passing their prime.
The Mustang was an innovation. The first ones were built on an existing platform, the Ford Falcon. Design a sporty body, add a few engine options with a little more power and you have got an economy car before they were needed, a muscle car, a sports car, a convertible. All with much less company resources.
And this car wasn’t marketed for the WW2 generation but for their kids. It was young, sexy, power, freedom, style, whatever you wanted to promote it as. And it sold and is still selling. (We shall ignore the 80’ Mustang II travesty.)
That grill took a lot of heat, but Ford has always had a problem with design. The comment of the day was “it looks like a Ford sucking on a lemon”. More expensive than the Fairlane 500 without any real improvements in performance. The Mustang was innovative in that it sort of resembled a sports car, in a clunky, typical Ford-like manner (especially when the 2+2 came out). A sports car designed by your grandmother, but sporty enough to attract buyers, particularly when they started dropping larger engines into it. It replaced the T-bird, which Ford mistakenly up-sized in 1958, thinking that America just couldn’t do without another 4-seater sedan. They immediately lost more market share to the Corvette, which was already a far better looking and performing vehicle. Ford eventually (and inevitably) ruined the Mustang, turning it into a boxy mutt for many years, albeit a mutt with a 5.0L engine. The recent design change has improved it immensely.
I agree. The Edsel designers were focused too much at what people had already been buying. The problem with that was those needs were already being met.
The Mustang designers were looking at a void in the market. They saw that was an unmet need and they filled it.
The secret to marketing success is finding a product that doesn’t exist yet but people would like to buy if it did.
It’s worth noting that the single most famous issue with the extensive marketing surveys used to create the Edsel branding was that the company ignored the surveys about brand names and chose “Edsel” by fiat. Hell, even Henry Ford II told them NOT to use the name “Edsel,” but an executive did so anyway.
Later surveys, when they bothered to do them about the name Edsel itself, showed customers did not like the name at all.
That’s sort of the opposite of what many posters have said so far – at least, in the case of the name issue alone, the problem wasn’t “marketing surveys don’t work,” but “bullheaded management decisions to ignore everyone, marketing surveys as well as experienced executives, lead to unpopularity.”
It didn’t help that the Edsel line was launched right in the middle of America’s first post-WWII recession. Not that the Edsel would have succeeded anyway, but it certainly didn’t make it easy for a new car line.
The name itself became synonymous with “marketing disaster” until superseded by the name “New Coke”.
And Ishtar.
It’s also worth noting that even when they get it right, they don’t necessarily get it right.
Ford knew the aerodynamic design of the Taurus would be a love-it-or-hate-it package, so that was a calculated risk. What they guessed wrong, however, was that America would be happy with the standard 4-cylinder engine. Instead, the great majority of non-fleet vehicles were ordered with the V-6, leaving Ford with a lot of difference between supply and demand.
Chrysler thought the minivan would be a good niche product against station wagons, but not a big deal. In fact, they slowed its development in favor of a new generation Imperial model. No one figured Chrysler would eventually sell 13 million minivans, and for years Chrysler would be known only for trucks and vans.
My dad always said that if they had just lined the grill with fur, they’d have sold a million!
From a business standpoint, this is the underlying truth that played out.
It certainly sonds like the market surveys, analysis, focus groups, etc. (for the EDSEL developemnt) were jst window dressing-all the decisions had been made; the “analysis” was just to confirm the decisions.
Had they really queried the market, they wold not have come up with such a turkey.