Ford Edsel is an automobile brand dating in years 1958-1960, it was designed, developed and produced by Ford Motor Company. With this model Ford was trying to enter in market to compete with General Motors and Chrysler in middle class cars. Ford invested heavily and made a one year campaign to attract consumers and make them believe that Edsel was the perfect cars of the future. But as the car was showed to the public it was considered to be “ugly”, overpriced and over advertised as a car.
As this happened Ford Edsel model never gained popularity, this made the model poorly sold in the market and never reach its goal to compute General Motors and Chrysler in the middle class cars. From this Ford Motor Company lost a lot of money give or take about 250 million dollars on Edsel model development production and marketing . From that day and on the name Edsel became a popular symbol for a commercial failure
Edsel name came in honor of Edsel Ford the former company president in 1919-1943 and the son of Henry Ford. Historians have tried to explain the failure of Edsel. here are some hypothesis .Popular culture often makes vehicle styling fail. Costumer reports have claimed that workmanship was very poor. Marketing Experts rate Edsel as an company failure to understand their costumers. Business analysts say that it was a poor internal support within Ford Executive offices. A American philosopher said “Edsel was the wrong car at wrong time.
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Reasons of Ford Edsel brand failure
- costumers didn’t care whether it was revolutionary or not, all they knew is that it looked ugly.
- had a name sounded like “weasel”.
- Edsel model was that it was too expensive for the costumers.
- Edsel Model had quality problems were parts didn’t fit properly or they were simply missing.
The chosen brand strategy that Ford chose to use was Product Line Extension that consists on the company that produces the new line in this example ford was introducing the new model Edsel in the same nature / category that in this case the new model was an automobile the nature/category that Ford motor company was operating for ages.
Brand elements are the elements that are used to represent and to indentify or differentiate a brand , simple examples of brand elements are the name , the logo ,the slogan. like in this case we have the name of Ford Motor Company worldwide known for its automobile manufacturing the logo that we all know is blue in background that represents the strength excellence and grace of the company and it has Ford written with white colour which represents the purity and elegance of the company. Not in this case but after some years when ford invited ford mustang a brand logo is the horse which is now days still and it is a good way to indentify ford mustang which his name was given after the a American horse which is small and light built. to go back to Edsel model they had many catchy slogans but still it was poorly sold in USA.
