Lately I’ve been thinking about Lincoln…
No, not THAT Lincoln! Zombie Lincoln, come home from your moonbase.
Lincoln Motors, makers of upscale Ford vehicles.
I’m thinking about Lincoln because it seems like the last big question mark in Ford’s impressive turnaround. For those of you who don’t follow the auto industry much, Ford brought in Alan Mullaly as CEO in 2006. Mullaly had gained fame for helping reinvigorate Boeing, and Ford was in dire need of the same major changes. Mullaly brought radical changes to the entire Ford organization, everything from changing the corporate culture to selling off unprofitable brands like Mercury, Land Rover, Jaguar and soon Volvo. The biggest gamble he made was to mortgage every asset he could find up to and including the company logo so Ford had the operating capital to revamp their entire product line.
Mullaly’s relentless focus on product has made Ford the most interesting domestic automaker today. New cars like the Taurus, Fiesta and my beloved Flex are changing Ford’s image as an also-ran budget car manufacturer to a leader in reliable, technology heavy and relatively upscale mass market cars. And the new product waves are coming strong- new Explorer, new Focus, new Mustangs- at a brisk pace, the direct result of the investments Ford made starting in 2006.
Ford has had a problem for a long, long time. That problem was that their three domestic car lines (Ford, Mercury and Lincoln) gradually became completely interchangeable. Every Lincoln and Mercury were just rebadged versions of the Ford vehicles. Originally, Ford was the car for the mass market; Mercury was supposed to be the premium brand, the car for the guy who got a promotion and found himself in management; and Lincoln was the luxury car for the owner of the company. Like GM’s “ladder model” (as you moved up the economic ladder, you moved up the brand ladder, from Chevy to Pontiac to Buick to Cadillac), Ford wanted to be able to keep a customer in the “Ford family” as their life circumstances changed.
But after World War 2, neither GM nor Ford could maintain their ladders, and soon Chevy was selling cars that competed on price and features with Buick, and Ford was selling cars that stepped on Mercury’s toes. Not only that, but during WWII the super-luxury brands like Cadillac were unable to maintain their lofty positions, so they began a long slide down the economic curve, a process which accelerated after the war in a bid to rationalize the brands. When Cadillac was first introduced, it was a car in the same league as Rolls Royce and Bentley; now GM is struggling to compete with Lexus and BMW. Lincoln fared worse than Cadillac, even though Lincoln was never a super-luxury brand. Mercury, Buick and Pontiac lost their identity all together and competed with Chevy and Ford.
Lincoln is the car for old people. This has been Lincoln’s market position for as long as I’ve been alive, and longer still than that. Sure, the Lincoln Town Car found a niche in the limo services, and you can still hire a driver to get you around New York City in one, as I did when I visited there earlier this year. But the Lincoln brand is almost completely tied to the age of its customer base, which is shrinking rapidly. Does anyone cross shop a Lexus or Mercedes with a Lincoln? Don’t bet on it.
When Mercury was put to sleep earlier this year, Ford said that they were going to shift those resources into Lincoln, to try and forge a new path for this long neglected division. Can they succeed? In the next post, I want muse over some ideas that I’ve been thinking about that would do just that.
Source: http://martinpease.blogspot.com/2010/08/thinkin-bout-lincoln-part-1.html