Word: edsel
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...Edsel was one of the cruelest tributes ever paid a man. Named after Henry Ford's son and the longtime company president--who died at age 49 in 1943--the Edsel was not just a car but a whole division within Ford, created to compete head-to-head with General Motors' Oldsmobile. It was a sales disaster. Two years later, future Ford president Robert McNamara persuaded the board to pull the plug on the Edsel. That's the same McNamara who became President Johnson's Secretary of Defense and refused to recommend withdrawing from Vietnam, even though he knew...
...Edsel fiasco has been autopsied many times--it is the stuff of books and business-school case studies--and yet I can't help reaching for the rib spreader one more time. Here was an early and definitive illustration of message revenge, the kind of fierce consumer blowback that can occur in markets when a product or service (or military occupation) fails to live up to its hype. Consumers, it turns out, regard their passive absorption of mass advertising as an investment of psychic space; to the extent that they allow themselves to become aroused with anticipation, they consider their...
...Edsel had been frantically ballyhooed for months ahead of its arrival with a new kind of highly scientific marketing, an alchemical blend of psychology, mass media and old-fashioned hucksterism. Call it the iEdsel. By the time the silk was pulled off the Edsel in hundreds of showrooms around the country, people were panting to see their automotive deliverance, the plutonium-powered, pancake-making supercar they'd been promised. What they saw was a large, relatively expensive, curiously styled Mercury--curious insofar as the vertical grille looked like a midwife's view of labor and delivery...
...same hype that made the Edsel a breathless, everywhere-at-once cultural phenomenon turned it into a national punch line. It was such an easy target that even the widely unloved Richard Nixon could get off a zinger. The Vice President was riding in a convertible Edsel in Lima, Peru, in 1958 when his motorcade was pelted with eggs. "They were throwing eggs at the car, not me," Nixon later quipped...
Fifty years on, the name Edsel remains shorthand for hubris and collapse, a mal mot of capitalism, right up there with New Coke, Betamax and Pets.com Except that Edsel was a real person and a pretty good one at that. On this, the anniversary of his maligning, it feels like somebody ought...