The Edsel was presumed to be everything American car buyers wanted, the “car of the future.” However, it turned into a financial disaster for the Ford Motor Company.
Ford was so confident in the undertaking that it pumped millions of dollars into it. But instead of revolutionizing the automobile industry, the company lost millions on the gas-guzzler, making it a great lesson on how not to undertake a new venture.
Ford started developing the Edsel in 1955, based on polling data from car shoppers. Unfortunately, the company chose to disregard much of what they had heard from these potential consumers.
Ford’s marketing department basically overpromised on the Edsel, beginning a yearlong teaser campaign that hyped the public’s hysteria, leading everyone to expect the car of the future–something the Edsel plainly was not.
Advertising wordsmiths strained to come up with a name, concocting thousands of names and testing them in focus groups with “real” people and Ford execs. They even went as far as consulting a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Marianne Moore, for the perfect name for the perfect car. Moore, noted for her linguistic precision, suggested such ridiculous names as the Utopian Turtletop and The Intelligent Whale.
Obviously, Moore was captivated by entities more akin to water travel than land travel.
Eventually, the car was named after one of the little known Ford family children, which didn’t add the kind of excitement a Mustang-type name rallies.
As for the design, the late John Brooks in his book Business
Adventures, a collection of New Yorker articles from the ‘60s, explains what went wrong in “The Fate of the Edsel.” Brooks writes, “It was arrived at without even a pretense of consulting the polls, and by the method that has been standard for years in the designing of automobiles– that of simply pooling the hunches of sundry company committees.”
Marketing slogans like, “The thrill starts with the grille,” and “Makes history by making sense,” were simply void of real substance.
The same committee executives, who spearheaded the project, later expressed to Brooks no recognition of their countless mistakes even though the Edsel was saddled with quality and reliability issues from the very beginning. It appeared the marketing campaign had been full of false promises and, in the aftermath, inflated egos were not about to accept any accountability.
The Edsel was finally laid to rest in 1959 when Ford President, Robert McNamara, slashed the marketing budget and finally convinced the rest of the management team to eliminate the money suck.
Thereafter, the word Edsel took on a specific meaning in the automobile lexicon: “failure.”
Most of the jokes focused on the Edsel’s grille that Ford designed to replace the horizontal grille of the 1950s. Intended to be the model’s distinctive trademark, it became known as the “toilet seat grille.”
It certainly did not help establish the Edsel’s distinctiveness; rather, a popular joke sprung up, originating in Time magazine, claiming the Edsel looked like “an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon.”
As a kid, who spent a lot of time shooting carp with bow and arrow along the brackish swollen Minnesota River banks each spring, I recall, after seeing an Edsel for the first time, the grille reminded me of the profile of a carp’s unattractive rubber lips.
Some even referred to the Edsel as an awkward appliance on wheels. “Hey Mom! Look that car has a place in front where you can put your laundry.”
Ugly, overpriced, overhyped, poorly constructed and poorly timed, the Edsel was manufactured for only two years. In the end, the failed program cost Ford millions. The “car of the future” is now a cautionary tale in business classrooms …and, might I suggest, a lesson in capital ventures for small counties like ours.
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.
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