Cars
The Nostalgia of Forgotten Gods: Edsel, USA, 1957-1960
In the 1950s, Ford launched Edsel to capture the mid-high market, but misaligned branding and consumer perception led to its swift demise. Today, it's a collector's item, prized for its rarity.
Until the early 1950s, the Ford Motor Company concentrated on low-cost models with Mercury for the middle segment and Lincoln as a high-end luxury brand. Forecasts for the automobile sector in the decade 1950-1960 indicated an increase in demand of more than 50 percent, thanks to improvements in the average earnings per capita and the lifestyle of the American people. The spectre of the Great Depression had finally disappeared. Ford therefore decided to reinforce its positioning by establishing a brand that would offer high-end features to a segment that was, in reality, medium to medium-high. It was not an easy gamble: The mid-range target group is naturally not very innovative and relying on a new brand without traditions requires courage.
The work started in 1954 with the code name E-Car (Experimental Car). The designers first initiated the development with the help of the marketing department, which carried out numerous surveys in order to understand and determine the desires of the average American. Very little use was actually made of this data. Finally, it was used as the basis for the advertising campaign, relying on the presumption that they knew what features would be needed for success. In fact, the new model was designed along the same lines as all previous models. Even the choice of name was approached scientifically with the involvement of top marketing firms, psychologists, sociologists, analysts and even a Pulitzer Prize winner: The poet Marianne Moore. In the end, despite a lot of hard work, the choice fell on the name Edsel in honour of Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford and president of the Ford Motor Company between 1919 and 1943. It would not have required many scholars to realise that, if a new brand was to be created that had no close ties to Ford, naming it after Henry's son's first name would have been a mistake.
