The Edsel was intended to be a triumph of American car-making which would sweep the Ford Motor Company to a dominating position. Instead, it became the most famous and most spectacular marketing failure in American business.
"Museum Pieces" is a diary series that explores the history behind some of the most interesting museum exhibits and historical places.
In 1945, the Second World War was at an end, the American economy would soon be booming, and the Ford Motor Company was at a turning point. Its founder, Henry Ford, was eased out of his management position by his grandson Henry Ford II. While Ford the elder had always viewed himself as the best and brightest mind in the company, Ford the younger saw things differently: in his view, the era of the individual industrial baron was over, and the era of the technocrat had begun. The new boss surrounded himself with a flock of consultants who had degrees in business management, finance, marketing, accounting, and engineering. They became known as “The Whiz Kids”.
One of the first things they did was reorganize the company, adding some new divisions. The first of these—Continental—would join Lincoln and Mercury and focus their attention on the luxury car market. The Ford division would continue to design and produce automobiles for the post-war middle-class market. And another division, dubbed at first “Special Product”, would develop and test concepts for a new future design that would fall, pricewise, between the luxury and economy markets.
The aim of all this was to catch up to, and then surpass, General Motors, which was the giant in the global auto industry. Ford was a distant second. So in the 1950s the Whiz Kids went to work to come up with a new design, code-named the E-Car (for “Experimental”), which would sweep the market and push Ford to the top.
An outsider at the time may have noticed a rather peculiar thing about most of these marketing guys—none of them had ever worked in the automobile industry before. But to Ford, that didn’t matter—they had come up with something even better than “experience”. The key to this process was something the company called “motivational research”, a process of polling and questioning potential customers to find out what characteristics they were looking for in an automobile and what sort of things made them choose one car over another. Today, such “market research” is routine for new products of all sorts, everything from candy bars to luxury yachts, but in the early 1950s it was a new concept, and Ford’s Whiz Kids were some of the first to embrace it.
As any exec knows, when it comes to advertising, choosing a good name is crucial. When it came to picking a model name for the E-Car, the marketing people had several requirements. The name had to be short and snappy. It had to have a good “image”, and also be easy to remember. In those days of print advertisements and billboards, it was best if the name began with a C, J, or S, since they could be dressed up with fancy fonts, and it should avoid the letters W, M or K, since these typefaces tended to look heavy and awkward. Eventually, the marketing team winnowed out thousands of proposed names (such as Altair and Phoenix) and settled on a list of four: Ranger, Pacer, Corsair, and Citation. But none of these really “clicked”, and so Ford asked a number of advertising agencies for input. A short list of four potential names was returned … and it turned out to be exactly the same four names that Ford’s marketing division had already suggested. Then a prominent poet was asked for ideas: she offered a long list with names like “Utopian Turtletop” and “Turcotinga”.
It was then that Ford’s Chairman Ernest Breech stepped up and suggested the name “Edsel”, after Henry Ford’s son. Whether because it was the Chairman of the company who suggested it, or whether it was just because the Whiz Kids couldn’t come up with any better name, the E-Car became the Edsel. It was just the first of many bad decisions. (The four top-runner names were later recycled to represent some of the various models of Edsel that were produced.)
It was now that the Ford marketing department began a years-long campaign of “hype”. The Edsel hadn’t even been designed yet, but Ford began dropping hints and selective leaks to the trade press that it would be the best automobile since the Model T. It would have a new and innovative push-button transmission, called “Teletouch”. There would be no clutch pedal on the floor, and no manual shifting lever on the steering column. There would be an electronic hood release, and self-adjusting brakes. Seat belts, not yet required for American autos, would be standard safety equipment. There would even be an automatic warning light if you accidentally left the parking brake on.
In addition to being a high-tech wonder, the Edsel would be stylish and trendy. Lots of fins, lots of chrome, a big 300-horsepower V-8 engine, and a distinctive vertical “horse-collar” front grill designed to make it instantly recognizable. It was, as advertising later declared, “long, clean, powerful”.
The marketing team began salivating even before the first Edsel rolled off the assembly line in 1958. The advertising blitz was unprecedented and relentless. The first ads didn’t even show the car—they depicted just the hood ornament and the caption “The Edsel is coming”. Soon there were print ads in every magazine and newspaper, and billboards on every highway. There was even a one-hour “Edsel Variety Show Special” on TV, with mega-stars Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby, whose only purpose was to advertise the new car. All the excitement had produced high expectations from both the company and the public. There would be four-door versions, two-door versions, convertibles, and station wagons. Projections predicted first-year sales of almost a quarter-million cars. Ford was convinced that they had a GM-killing winner.
They were to be sorely disappointed.
One important factor was, to be fair, beyond Ford’s control. In 1958, the postwar economic boom had begun to slow down, and the US entered a short but sharp recession. Automobile sales of all types slumped, with some companies losing over a third of their annual revenue over last year. The Edsel sold only 60,000 units in 1958.
Another factor, though, was that consumer tastes in 1958 had changed, and the marketing Whiz Kids, who had done most of their research in 1954 and 1955, had failed to detect it. The huge powerful finned chromed car of the mid-50s had fallen out of favor and was viewed as something of an anachronism. (And the Edsel’s trademark horse-collar front grill looked … well … like a toilet seat.)
But many of Ford’s difficulties came because the Edsel was, despite all the hype, simply not a very good car. The much-vaunted clutchless Teletouch push-button transmission was unfamiliar and confusing for drivers, and the fact that the shifting buttons were located in the center of the steering wheel, where the horn usually was, made it a potential safety hazard. In the hurry to begin production, Ford had not set up a separate production plant for the Edsel: instead, when the new brand came down the assembly line auto workers had to quickly switch to a new parts bin, put it in place, then switch back to the ordinary Fords. Sometimes they didn’t have enough time, and either bolted the wrong part into place or didn’t install any part at all, and so fairly often Edsels rolled off the line with improper assembly. Ford would ship these anyway, with the correct parts sitting in the trunk for the dealer’s own mechanics to install. The brand quickly gained a reputation for mechanical unreliability.
In desperation, Ford tried to backpedal. In its second production year, the Teletouch transmission disappeared and the engine was dropped to a six-cylinder for better gas mileage. But it was already too late. In November 1959, with the hopes of the Whiz Kids callously dashed by brutal reality, Ford announced that the Edsel line would be discontinued. Only 118,000 Edsels had been produced. Today, it is a sought-after collectors car.
The Winn Antique Automobile Museum, in Asheville NC, has an Edsel Corsair on display.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)