Word: mediums
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Detroit had expected it for months; last week Ford Motor Co. finally had to make it official. The company dropped its medium-priced Edsel, introduced only two years ago. Said Ford, in a pained announcement: "Retail sales have been particularly disappointing, and continued production of the Edsel is not justified, especially in view of the shortage of steel...
...Edsel was a classic case of the wrong car for the wrong market at the wrong time. It was also a prime example of the limitations of market research, with its "depth interviews" and "motivational" mumbo-jumbo. On the research, Ford had an airtight case for a new medium-priced car to compete with Chrysler's Dodge and DeSoto, General Motors' Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick. Studies showed that by 1965 half of all U.S. families would be in the $5,000-and-up bracket, would be buying more cars in the medium-priced field, which already...
...decision was made in 1955, Ford ran more studies to make sure the new car had precisely the right "personality." Research showed that Mercury buyers were generally young and hot-rod-inclined, while Pontiac, Dodge and Buick appealed to middle-aged people. Edsel was to strike a happy medium. As one researcher said, it would be "the smart car for the younger executive or professional family on its way up." To get this image across, Ford even went to the trouble of putting out a 60-page memo on the procedural steps in the selection of an advertising agency, turned...
...Taste of Lemon. The flaw in all the research was that by 1957, when Edsel appeared, the bloom was gone from the medium-priced field, and a new boom was starting in the compact field, an area the Edsel research had overlooked completely. Edsel's styling, in particular the grille, which resembled an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon, was not much help, even after the lemon was removed. In its first six months Edsel made 54,600 cars, and then went steadily downward: 26,500 cars in 1958, fewer than 30,000 cars so far in boom-time...
Headless Giant. Yet the trouble lies even deeper than that. The quiz hearings served to focus a general discontent with TV, a widespread feeling that its masters do not allow the medium to live up to its great promise. In defense, TV's top men could and did say that they have enormous problems, chief among them the vast and amorphous audience. Where a newspaper or magazine can address itself to one kind of audience, television must play...