MyPE

Community Business Directory, Event Listings, News and Views from Gqeberha, Nelson Mandela Bay

Ford Edsel (Business)

By

Ford EdselThe Ford Edsel is considered as a business case study to explain why products flop.

Ford’s designers and marketers began development on the car in 1955, with the intent of creating an automobile tailored to the desires of the American people, as determined through seemingly endless polling.

Ad men got to work thinking up thousands of names and testing them in focus groups with civilians and Ford execs, and even consulted the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marianne Moore for the perfect name for the perfect car. (Moore suggested such absurd names as the Utopian Turtletop and The Intelligent Whale.) Despite endless hours of testing and consultation, the chairman of the board decided at the last minute that he was going to go with Edsel, the name of Henry Ford’s son.

Ugly, overpriced, overhyped, poorly made and poorly timed, the Edsel was made for only two years. Ford pumped $ 250 million into the Edsel before launch (it is estimated that the eventual cost was $ 350 Million). The “car of the future” is now a cautionary tale in business classrooms, though there were actually a few winners in the case of the Edsel. That flop of a car is now a rare collector’s item. Relatively few cars were built between 1958 and 1960 (when production ended), and Edsel convertible models can fetch as much as $ 47,000.

Date: October 22, 2015 07:18

Click here for more: MyPE Images – MyPE (Latest images)

Many more PE Images here.

The following two tabs change content below.

Port Elizabethan

This author is a 'catch-all' for occasional articles and letters written to MyPE. The Author of each article can be found in the signature at the bottom of each individual article.