Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [11]
Not everyone held the same opinion though. The PR director, C Gayle Warnock, knew that Edsel was not the right name. It had been an early suggestion, and had not been liked by those members of the public who had taken part in the market research (in word- association tests, it had been associated with ‘weasel’ and ‘pretzel’ – hardly the best associations for a dynamic new car). Warnock had preferred other names on the list, such as Pacer, Ranger, Corsair or Citation. When the decision was made, Warnock made his feelings perfectly clear. According to Robert Lacey in his book Ford: The men and the machine, Warnock responded to the new Edsel name by declaring: ‘We have just lost 200,000 sales.’ For Warnock, a rose by any other name clearly didn’t smell as sweet.
As it turned out, the name was the least of the Edsel’s problems. There was also the design.
The first blueprint for the Edsel looked truly impressive, as Robert Lacey writes in his book on Ford. ‘With concealed airscoops below the bumpers, this first version of the car was original and dramatic – a dreamlike, ethereal creation which struck those who saw it as the very embodiment of the future.’ However, this magnificent design never got to see the light of day. The people who held onto the purse strings at Ford decided it would simply be too expensive to manufacture.
The design that eventually emerged was certainly unique. Edsel’s chief designer, Roy Brown Jr, had always set out to design a car that would be recognizable instantly, from any direction. And indeed, there is no denying that the first Edsels to emerge in 1957 fulfilled this objective. In particular, the car’s front-end bonnet and grille commanded the most attention. ‘The front end design was the most prominent feature,’ confirms Phil Skinner, a respected Edsel historian, ‘If you consider other cars from the mid-1950s, they all looked somewhat alike. Basically it was two headlights and a horizontal grille. By having the big impact ring in the middle – what we now call a horse collar – it really set the Edsel apart.’
Although some members of the automotive press commended this distinctive look, most were unappreciative. One reviewer famously remarked that it looked ‘like an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon.’ While another thought the front-end grille was less like a horse collar, and more like a toilet seat. (The customer comments later proved to be even worse with some saying that the grille looked like a ‘vagina with teeth’.)
However, Ford had good relations with the press and Warnock, the PR director, was determined to maximize the media coverage immediately before and after the launch date. Articles subsequently appeared in both Time and Life magazines heralding the Edsel as a breakthrough and explaining how it had been planned for over a decade – a blatant exaggeration on the part of Warnock as Roy Brown had only begun designing the car in 1954. The promotional brochure to mark the September launch of the Edsel also promised a great deal. ‘There has never been a car like the Edsel,’ it promised. This was a big claim, but Ford had equally big ambitions. The company expected to produce 200,000 units in the car’s first year. This constituted around 5 per cent of the entire market.
Anyway, the pre-publicity had initially seemed to work. Car showrooms became packed with curious visitors, desperately seeking their first glance of the car. In the first week of its launch, almost 3 million members of the US public visited Edsel showrooms. The Edsels they saw had a number of distinct features, in addition to the ‘love-it-or-hate-it’ front-end grille. For instance, the car was the first ever to have self-adjusting brakes and an electronic hood release. It also had a very powerful engine for a medium-range car. However, these features weren’t enough.
In the minds of the public, the car simply didn’t live up to the hype.