Ley Orgánica del Régimen de Soberanía Alimentaria

”And so it uent. Edsel ran out of steering columns, Ranger and Pacer nameplates and Corsair and Citation crash pads in

September, during one of the tuo heaviest production months the car uould knou. Neu specifications uere ordered for the gears in the push button steering column and, in the meantime, gears on hand uere hand-shaven before installation.n

Not everything ran against the neu car; there uere executives like Denny Bracken, the Manufacturing Manager at Mercury, uho took a personal

interest in the production of the Edsel. These efforts uere, houever, of someuhat dubious value as the undeniable improvements in quality uhich uere apparent in the Citations and Corsairs coming from his assembly plants uere clearly lacking in the Rangers and Pacers that uere built by the Ford Division. Doyle chose to ignore the criticism implicit in this comparison and to dream the old dreams of a better future uith the Edsel. He felt that, in the beginning at least, the likely market and the available production uould support no more than 1,200 Edsel outlets, particularly if care uere taken, in the metropol­ itan areas, to avoid unnecessary competition betueen neighbouring distributors.

One such unsuitable area uas found by Ularnock in his search for someuhere fitting for the unveiling of the Edsel. He found a town called Edsel in Kentucky. It uas tuo hours drive from tarmac

roads, had no cars at all, consisted of tuo buildings - the general store and the post office - run by the population, the tuo Blevins brothers, uho also kept horses. They had named the toun after Edsel Ford.

Doyle had more weighty matters to contemplate* He had

visions of there being between 2,500 and 3,000 locations luhere Edsels might be sold and serviced. These dealerships would)he believed, be directly responsible for the creation of 50,000 new jobs with a further 30,000 posts appearing within Ford's and their suppliers as business developed.

The Edsel was due to be launched at the beginning of September

1957 and those concerned were not necessarily overjoyed with the natur^. of the impending advertising. Wallace had originally argued that

‘'The Edsel is the car for the young executive on his way up. Our theme is elegance. We're classy. The other cars are all fixed in a hierarchy of status, but with the Edsel, nobody knows who snoots whom. Fine. We're going to stress what this car will do for its owner. We'll have a powerful car, but we won't stress that. We won't sfcip the mechanical features by a dam sight, but our message, what we're really talking about, is what this car does for the individual, in terms of status.”

Doyle agreed but expressed a sales manager's anxiety about doing anything that might tend to exclude potential buyers; his first desire was to offer a car that everybody and anybody might want to buy. The Edsel Division's advertising agency also accepted Wallace's recommendations but with one alteration; the Edsel was to be the car for the 'middle class family' rather than 'the young executive.'

The agency then prepared three alternative advertising

campaigns in full; these were presented to the Edsel management, who indicated a preference, before going to Henry Ford II and Ernest

Breech who made the final choice. A number of very expensive simultan­ eous T.V. broadcasts were considered as additions to the campaign

but neither the agency nor the Edsel Division could find one that was appropriate to both the product and the budget. It was eventually decided that Warnock's (Op.cit) eighteen months of Public Relations work offered the perfect foundation for a 'teaser' campaign (a series of advertisements saying here it comes, any moment now, almost ready ... yet not revealing much of the Edsel) and so the relevant press and radio spots were'booked for the weeks preceding the launch of the Edsel.

Mayer (1961 )^*J uho at the time uorked for Foote, Cone the Edsel Division’s agency, notes otheruise

”In thB event, this plan, too^collapsed: Ford central staff decided to eliminate the teaser campaign entirely (saving only the four preannouncement magazine ads, uhich uere run only in 'Life* and concentrated on the idea that this car, though neu, had been on the testing grounds for years) and to put the money into special institutional advertising for the Ford Company itself, keyed to the introduction of the Edsel. Neither the division nor Foote, Cone uas at all happy uith this arrangement (uhich also cast Foote, Cone about a million dollars of billing on the account, since Kenyon & Eckhardt does all Ford institutional advertising). But Ford had put up some #250 million to start the Edsel and if central staff felt that a million dollars should be spent to publicise this fact rather than tout Edsels, there uas nobody at the agency or the division uho could quarrel.”

McNamara uent one step further; on 28th August 1957 at the

recording of an Edsel sponsored Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra T.V.

special, he told the head of Edsel's advertising agency that he had plans for phasing the car out. The programme in question uas not shoun

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until 13th October and, as Mayer (1961) explains,

”By that time, of course, most of the neus value had uorn off the Edsel: partly by accident but mostly by design, the car had slipped into the American consciousness so gradually that it might have been there all along.”

Mayer’s (Op.cit) is a very unusual account in that it uas not only uritten by someone uho as involved in the marketing of the Edsel but at a time uhen the outcome of this venture uas neither knoun or apparent. Enlightenment uas soon at hand, houever, for the automobile market of 1957 uas characterised by an almost total lack of the

buoyancy uhich had, in 1955, given rise to the Edsel.1957 models uere selling morB slouly and heavy discounts uere needed, to clear out the old stock before the arrival, in autumn, of the 1958 models. There

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