| 777 | Date: Saturday, 30 Oct 2010, 15.12 | Message # 1 |
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User ID: 777
Joined: 18 Oct 2010
Messages: 1035
| Ask the man on the street about Mercury, and you’re bound to hear something along the lines of, “I didn’t know they were still making cars.” That’s even worse that hearing that your brand sucks. And Mercury’s inability to dent the consciousness of Americans, let alone their wallets, means Ford is quite able to consider killing the moribund Mercury brand. Indeed, the move is long overdue.
Citing unnamed company sources, Bloomberg News first reported that Ford executives are preparing a proposal to kill off the brand, which was created in 1939 by Edsel Ford. Up until 2002, Mercury was the pet project of Edsel’s great-granddaughter Elena Ford. And it wasn’t a stretch to suspect that the family connection -- and nostalgia for the brand Edsel created -- helped spare Mercury from the ax. But now Bloomberg’s sources suggest that an even more powerful Ford, Executive Chairman William Ford Jr., supports doing away with Mercury.
The continued survival of Mercury, whose heyday was at least 30 years ago, is one of the industry’s existential head-scratchers. And I’ve long been skeptical of so-called “premium” brands like Mercury. These tweeners, stuck in the no-man’s-land between mainstream and luxury, are another holdover of a quaint automotive age, when the Big Three hogged 90 percent of the automotive market. Today, with Detroit retrenching and shedding brands to ideally build up its remaining strengths, there’s no room left on the island for Mercury.
Back in 1978, Mercury was selling nearly 600,000 cars. That number fell to barely 92,000 last year. And Mercury’s second-best-selling car, the stodgy Grand Marquis (purchased almost entirely by police departments and octogenerians) is going out of production soon.
Mercury was born after the Depression as a brand for working-class folks to aspire to: a step up from workaday Ford but a step below luxury Lincoln, just as GM’s Buick was positioned between Chevy and the deluxe Cadillac. Yet today, when Lincoln itself is struggling to compete against the BMWs and Lexuses of the world, what chance is there for a Mercury brand that’s been starved for new products and a distinct identity for decades? The Mercury Milan is a nice little sedan, and the Mariner is a fine compact SUV, yet both models are wholly unnecessary, both barely disguised offshoots of the far more popular Ford Fusion and Ford Escape.
As a car lover, it’s hard not to feel a nostalgic twinge for all failed brands. But when you have to go back to James Dean to find a Mercury to get worked up about (the duck-tailed Dean famously drove a ’49 Merc in “Rebel Without a Cause”) then you know you’re in trouble. Even by the muscle-car era, Mercury had to be content with a weak, obscure offshoot of the Mustang called the Cougar. And don't even get me started about the first, and last, Mercury that came into my household in the '70s, a sickly orange Comet that was itself a poor cousin of the equally crapulent Ford Maverick.
Among American stalwarts, GM’s Oldsmobile and Pontiac are already gone, along with the failed import-fighter Saturn. Chrysler knocked off Plymouth. And Ford itself has been steadily shedding its once-proud portfolio of luxury brands -- Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo -- that instead turned out, collectively, to be a multibillion-dollar millstone.
But once Mercury gets a proper burial and a nice eulogy, Ford can do what it should have done years ago: take every penny that essentially is being wasted on Mercury styling, engineering, marketing and advertising, and divert it to its core Ford and Lincoln brands. That's Ford's best chance to maintain its current momentum; it doesn't need worry about the care and feeding of an orphan brand that Americans will never miss.
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