If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to business, non fiction lovers. Your Rating:. The image of the Ford came into focus as that of a very fast, strongly masculine car, of no particular social pretensions, that might characteristically be driven by a rancher or an automobile mechanic.
Buick jelled into a middle-aged lady—or, at least, more of a lady than Ford, sex in cars having proved to be relative—with a bit of the devil still in her, whose most felicitous mate would be a lawyer, a doctor, or a dance-band leader.
By the time the researchers closed the books on Peoria and San Bernardino, they had elicited replies not only to these questions but to others, several of which, it would appear, only the most abstruse sociological thinker could relate to medium-priced cars. We may infer that these respondents are aware of the fact that they are in the learning process. Wallace, dreaming of an ideally lovable E-Car, was delighted as returns like these came pouring into his Dearborn office.
But when the time for a final decision drew near, it became clear to him that he must put aside peripheral issues like cocktail-mixing prowess and address himself once more to the old problem of the image. And here, it seemed to him, the greatest pitfall was the temptation to aim, in accordance with what he took to be the trend of the times, for extremes of masculinity, youthfulness, and speed; indeed, the following passage from one of the Columbia reports, as he interpreted it, contained a specific warning against such folly.
Offhand we might conjecture that women who drive cars probably work, and are more mobile than non-owners, and get gratifications out of mastering a traditionally male role. But … there is no doubt that whatever gratifications women get out of their cars, and whatever social imagery they attach to their automobiles, they do want to appear as women.
Perhaps more worldly women, but women. The answer quite definitely is Yes. When there is a conflict between owner characteristics and make image, there is greater planning to switch to another make. In other words, when the buyer is a different kind of person from the person he thinks would own his make, he wants to change to a make in which he, inwardly, will be more comfortable.
Should a make have a strong and well-defined image, it is obvious that an owner with strong opposing characteristics would be in conflict. But conflict also can occur when the make image is diffuse or weakly defined. In this case, the owner is in an equally frustrating position of not being able to get a satisfactory identification from his make. The question, then, was how to steer between the Scylla of a too definite car personality and the Charybdis of a too weak personality. Younger: appealing to spirited but responsible adventurers.
Executive or professional: millions pretend to this status, whether they can attain it or not. Very early in its history, Krafve had suggested to members of the Ford family that the new car be named for Edsel Ford, who was the only son of old Henry; the president of the Ford Motor Company from until his death, in ; and the father of the new generation of Fords—Henry II, Benson, and William Clay.
The three brothers had let Krafve know that their father might not have cared to have his name spinning on a million hubcaps, and they had consequently suggested that the Special Products Division start looking around for a substitute.
This it did, with a zeal no less emphatic than it displayed in the personality crusade. In the late summer and early fall of , Wallace hired the services of several research outfits, which sent interviewers, armed with a list of two thousand possible names, to canvass sidewalk crowds in New York, Chicago, Willow Run, and Ann Arbor. The interviewers did not ask simply what the respondent thought of some such name as Mars, Jupiter, Rover, Ariel, Arrow, Dart, or Ovation.
They asked what free associations each name brought to mind, and having got an answer to this one, they asked what word or words was considered the opposite of each name, on the theory that, subliminally speaking, the opposite is as much a part of a name as the tail is of a penny. The results of all this, the Special Products Division eventually decided, were inconclusive. Meanwhile, Krafve and his men held repeated sessions in a darkened room, staring, with the aid of a spotlight, at a series of cardboard signs, each bearing a name, as, one after another, they were flipped over for their consideration.
One of the men thus engaged spoke up for the name Phoenix, because of its connotations of ascendancy, and another favored Altair, on the ground that it would lead practically all alphabetical lists of cars and thus enjoy an advantage analogous to that enjoyed in the animal kingdom by the aardvark. He puffed on his pipe, smiled an academic smile, and nodded. THE card-flipping sessions proved to be as fruitless as the sidewalk interviews, and it was at this stage of the game that Wallace, resolving to try and wring from genius what the common mind had failed to yield, entered into the celebrated car-naming correspondence with the poet Marianne Moore, which was later published in The New Yorker and still later, in book form, by the Morgan Library.
Suspecting that the bosses of the Special Products Division might regard this list as a trifle unwieldy, the agency got to work and cut it down to six thousand names, which it presented to them in executive session. Before the weekend was over, the two Foote, Cone offices presented their separate lists of ten to the Special Products Division, and by an almost incredible coincidence, which all hands insist was a coincidence, four of the names on the two lists were the same; Corsair, Citation, Pacer, and Ranger had miraculously survived the dual scrutiny.
Just what we wanted. The epochal decision was reached at a meeting of the Ford executive committee held at a time when, as it happened, all three Ford brothers were away.
There were to be four main models of the E-Car, with variations on each one, and Breech soothed some of his colleagues by adding that the magic four—Corsair, Citation, Pacer, and Ranger —might be used, if anybody felt so inclined, as the subnames for the models. A telephone call was put through to Henry II, who was vacationing in Nassau. He said that if Edsel was the choice of the executive committee, he would abide by its decision, provided he could get the approval of the rest of his family.
Within a few days, he got it. But it has a personal dignity and meaning to many of us here. Our name, dear Miss Moore, is—Edsel. I hope you will understand. But their sense of disappointment was as nothing compared to the gloom that enveloped many employees of the Special Products Division. What were its free associations? Pretzel, diesel, hard sell. What was its opposite? Still, the matter was settled, and there was nothing to do but put the best possible face on it.
Besides, the anguish in the Special Products Division was by no means unanimous, and Krafve himself, of course, was among those who had no objection to the name. He still has none, declining to go along with those who contend that the decline and fall of the Edsel may be dated from the moment of its christening.
Krafve himself managed to remain earthbound, though he had his own reasons for feeling buoyant; in recognition of his leadership of the E-Car project up to that point, he was given the august title of Vice-President of the Ford Motor Company and General Manager, Edsel Division.
From the administrative point of view, this off-with-the-old-on-with-the-new effect was merely harmless window dressing. Above all, the campaign was to be classic in its calmness.
Like a chess master who has no doubt that he will win, he could afford to explicate the brilliance of his moves even as he made them. Ordinarily, an established manufacturer launches a new car through dealers who are already handling his other makes and who, to begin with, take on the upstart as a sort of sideline. Not so in the case of the Edsel; Krafve received authorization from on high to go all out and build up a retail-dealer organization by making raids on dealers who had contracts with other manufacturers, or even with the other Ford Company divisions —Ford and Lincoln-Mercury.
Although the Ford dealers thus corralled were not obliged to cancel their old contracts, all the emphasis was on signing up retail outlets exclusively dedicated to the selling of Edsels. The goal set for Introduction Day—which, after a great deal of soul-searching, was finally established as September 4, —was twelve hundred Edsel dealers from coast to coast.
They were not to be just any dealers, either; Krafve made it clear that Edsel was interested in signing up only dealers whose records showed that they had a marked ability to sell cars without resorting to the high-pressure tricks of borderline legality that had lately been giving the automobile business a bad name. On an Edsel, he will blame the car. The average dealer has at least a hundred thousand dollars tied up in his agency, and in large cities the investment is much higher.
He must hire salesmen, mechanics, and office help; buy his own tools, technical literature, and signs, the latter costing as much as five thousand dollars a set; and pay the factory spot cash for the cars he receives from it.
The man charged with mobilizing an Edsel sales force along these exacting lines was J. Larry Doyle, who, as general sales-and-marketing manager of the division, ranked second to Krafve himself. A veteran of forty years with the Ford Company, who had started with it as an office boy in Kansas City and had spent the intervening time mainly selling, Doyle was a maverick in his field.
Needless to say, we kept those offices locked and the blinds drawn. Dealers in every make for miles around wanted to see the car, if only out of curiosity, and that gave us the leverage we needed. We let it be known that we would show the car only to dealers who were really interested in coming with us, and then we sent our regional field managers out to surrounding towns to try to line up the No. It worked very well.
In fact, it missed the goal of twelve hundred by a couple of dozen. In retrospect, it would seem that Doyle could have given lessons to the Pied Piper.
Now that the Edsel was no longer the exclusive concern of Dearborn, the Ford Company was irrevocably committed to going ahead. The matter was attended to with dispatch. In June, too, an Edsel destined to be the star of a television commercial for future release was stealthily transported in a closed van to Hollywood, where, on a locked sound stage patrolled by security guards, it was exposed to the cameras in the admiring presence of a few carefully chosen actors who had sworn that their lips would be sealed from then until Introduction Day.
For this delicate photographic operation the Edsel Division cannily enlisted the services of Cascade Pictures, which also worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, and, as far as is known, there were no unintentional leaks. Within a few weeks, the Edsel Division had eighteen hundred salaried employees and was rapidly filling some fifteen thousand factory jobs in the newly converted plants. On July 22nd, the first advertisement for the Edsel appeared—in Life.
A two-page spread in plain black-and-white, it was impeccably classic and calm, showing a car whooshing down a country highway at such high speed that it was an indistinguishable blur. Whoever wrote the ad cannot have known how truly he spoke. Gayle Warnock, director of public relations, whose duty was not so much to generate public interest in the forthcoming product, there being an abundance of that, as to keep the interest at white heat, and readily convertible into a desire to buy one of the new cars on or after Introduction Day—or, as the company came to call it, Edsel Day.
This was something new to me—I was used to taking what breaks I could get when I could get them—but I soon found out how right Dick was. It was almost too easy to get publicity for the Edsel. Early in , when it was still called the E-Car, Krafve gave a little talk about it out in Portland, Oregon.
Clippings came in by the bushel. Right then I realized the trouble we might be headed for. The policy was later violated now and then, purposely or inadvertently. And, for another, Edsels loaded on vans for delivery to dealers were appearing on the highways in ever-increasing numbers, covered fore and aft with canvas flaps that, as if to whet the desire of the motoring public, were forever blowing loose.
That summer, too, was a time of speechmaking by an Edsel foursome consisting of Krafve, Doyle, J. Copeland, its assistant general sales manager for advertising, sales promotion, and training. Ranging separately up and down and across the nation, the four orators moved around so fast and so tirelessly that Warnock, lest he lose track of them, took to indicating their whereabouts with colored pins on a map in his office. And well they might have been, for developments in the general economic outlook of the nation were making more sanguine men than Krafve look puzzled.
In July, , the stock market went into a nose dive, marking the beginning of what is recalled as the recession of Then, early in August, a decline in the sales of medium-priced cars of all makes set in, and the general situation worsened so rapidly that, before the month was out, Automotive News reported that dealers in all makes were ending their season with the second-largest number of unsold new cars in history.
Meanwhile, sales of the Rambler, which was the only American-made small car then in production, were beginning to rise ominously. Perhaps the least impressed of all was Judge, who, while doing his bit as an itinerant speaker, specialized in community and civic groups. He wandered restlessly around the auditorium as he spoke, shifting the kaleidoscopic images on the screen at will with the aid of an automatic slide changer—a trick made possible by a crew of electricians who laced the place in advance with a maze of wires linking the device to dozens of floor switches, which, scattered about the hall, responded when he kicked them.
At the last moment, Judge would descend melodramatically on the town by plane, hasten to the hall, and go into his act. This is the Edsel story. It differed from previous automotive jamborees of its kind in that the journalists were invited to bring their wives along—and many of them did. Before it was over, it had cost the Ford Company ninety thousand dollars. Thus hobbled, Warnock could do no better for the reporters and their wives when they converged on the Detroit scene on Sunday evening, August 25th, than to put them up at the discouragingly named Sheraton-Cadillac Hotel and to arrange for them to spend Monday afternoon hearing and reading about the long-awaited details of the entire crop of Edsels—eighteen varieties available, in four main lines Corsair, Citation, Pacer, and Ranger , differing mainly in their size, power, and trim.
It went over fine. There was excitement even among the hardened newspapermen. In the afternoon, the reporters were whisked out to the test track to see a team of stunt drivers put the Edsel through its paces. This event, calculated to be thrilling, turned out to be hair-raising, and even, for some, a little unstringing. Edsels ran over two-foot ramps on two wheels, bounced from higher ramps on all four wheels, were driven in crisscross patterns, grazing each other, at sixty or seventy miles per hour, and skidded into complete turns at fifty.
For comic relief, there was a clown driver parodying the daredevil stuff. All the while, the voice of Neil L. Krafve replied tersely that he would answer when it was over and all hands safe.
But everyone else seemed to be having a grand time. It was beautiful. It was like the Rockettes. It was exciting. Morale was high. The stunt driving, like the unveiling, was considered too rich for the blood of the wives, but the resourceful Warnock was ready for them with a fashion show that he hoped they would find at least equally diverting.
He need not have worried. Things were never again quite the same since between Brown and Warnock, but the wives were able to give their husbands an extra paragraph or two for their stories. The next morning, at a windup press conference held by Ford officials.
One guy simply miscalculated and cracked up his car running into something. No fault of the Edsel there. One car lost its oil pan, so naturally the motor froze. It can happen to the best of cars. Fortunately, at the time of this malfunction the driver was going through a beautiful- sounding town—Paradise, Kansas, I think it was—and that gave the news reports about it a nice little positive touch.
The nearest dealer gave the reporter a new Edsel, and he drove on home, climbing Pikes Peak on the way. Then one car crashed through a tollgate when the brakes failed. That was bad.
That was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. One of our reporters was tooling along—no problems—when a Plymouth driver pulled up alongside to rubberneck, and edged so close that the Edsel got sideswiped. Minor damage. Indeed, during the period between the press preview and Edsel Day the spirit of everybody associated with the venture seems to have been one of wild optimism. A dealer in Portland, Oregon, reported that he had already sold two Edsels, sight unseen.
On E Day, the Edsel arrived. In the ad, Ford looked like a dignified young father, Breech like a dignified gentleman holding a full house against a possible straight, the Edsel just looked like an Edsel. Three days later, in North Philadelphia, an Edsel was stolen.
It can reasonably be argued that the crime marked the high-water mark of public acceptance of the Edsel; only a few months later, any but the least fastidious of car thieves might not have bothered.
This, in contrast to the wide and horizontal grilles of all nineteen other American makes of the time, was slender and vertical. It was intended to suggest the front end of practically any car of twenty or thirty years ago and of most contemporary European cars, and thus to look at once seasoned and sophisticated.
The trouble was that whereas the front ends of the antiques and the European cars were themselves high and narrow—consisting, indeed, of little more than the radiator grilles—the front end of the Edsel was broad and low, just like the front ends of all its American competitors. Consequently, there were wide areas on either side of the grille that had to be filled in with something, and filled in they were —with twin panels of entirely conventional horizontal chrome grillwork.
The attempt at sophistication was so transparent as to be endearing. But if the grille of the Edsel appealed through guilelessness, the rear end was another matter. Here, too, there was a marked departure from the conventional design of the day. Instead of the notorious tail fin, the car had what looked to its fanciers like wings and to others, less ethereal-minded, like eyebrows. The lines of the trunk lid and the rear fenders, swooping upward and outward, did somewhat resemble the wings of a gull in flight, but the resemblance was marred by two long, narrow tail lights, set partly in the trunk lid and partly in the fenders, which followed those lines and created the startling illusion, especially at night, of a slant-eyed grin.
From the front, the Edsel seemed, above all, anxious to please, even at the cost of being clownish; from the rear it looked crafty, Oriental, smug, one-up—maybe a little cynical and contemptuous, too. It was as if, somewhere between grille and rear fenders, a sinister personality change had taken place. In other respects, the exterior styling of the Edsel was not far out of the ordinary. Its sides were festooned with a bit less than the average amount of chrome, and distinguished by a gouged-out bullet- shaped groove extending forward from the rear fender for about half the length of the car.
Epitomizing this epitome, the automatic-transmission control box—arrestingly situated on top of the steering post, in the center of the wheel—sprouted a galaxy of five push buttons so light to the touch that, as Edsel men could hardly be restrained from demonstrating, they could be depressed with a toothpick. Of the four lines of Edsels, both of the two larger and more expensive ones—the Corsair and the Citation—were inches long, or two inches longer than the biggest of the Oldsmobiles; both were eighty inches wide, or about as wide as passenger cars ever get; and the height of both was only fifty- seven inches, as low as any other medium-priced car.
The Ranger and the Pacer, the smaller Edsels, were six inches shorter, an inch narrower, and an inch lower than the Corsair and the Citation. The Corsair and the Citation were equipped with horsepower engines, making them more powerful than any other American car at the time of their debut, and the Ranger and the Pacer were good for horsepower, near the top in their class. If anything or anybody happened to be in the way when the toothpick touched the push button, so much the worse.
WHEN the wraps were taken off the Edsel, it received what is known in the theatrical business as a mixed press. Magazine criticism was generally more exhaustive and occasionally more severe.
Motor Trend, the largest monthly devoted to ordinary automobiles, as distinct from hot rods, devoted eight pages of its October, , issue to an analysis and critique of the Edsel by Joe H. Wherry, its Detroit editor. After having put a Corsair through a series of road tests, Consumer Reports declared: The Edsel has no important basic advantages over other brands.
The car is almost entirely conventional in construction. It embodied much of the spirit of its time—or at least of the time when it was designed, early in It was clumsy, powerful, dowdy, gauche, well-meaning —a de Kooning woman. The Edsel was obviously jinxed, but to say that it was jinxed by its design alone would be an oversimplification, as it would be to say that it was jinxed by an excess of motivational research.
The fact is that in the short, unhappy life of the Edsel a number of other factors contributed to its commercial downfall. One of these was the scarcely believable circumstance that many of the very first Edsels—those obviously destined for the most glaring public limelight—were dramatically imperfect. By its preliminary program of promotion and advertising, the Ford Company had built up an overwhelming head of public interest in the Edsel, causing its arrival to be anticipated and the car itself to be gawked at with more eagerness than had ever greeted any automobile before it.
Within a few weeks after the Edsel was introduced, its pratfalls were the talk of the land. An obviously distraught man staggered into a bar up the Hudson River, demanding a double shot without delay and exclaiming that the dashboard of his new Edsel had just burst into flame.
A former executive of the Edsel Division has estimated that only about half of the first Edsels really performed properly. A layman cannot help wondering how the Ford Company, in all its power and glory, could have been guilty of such a Mack Sennett routine of buildup and anticlimax.
Evidence that people are selling stocks at a time when they ought to be eating lunch is always regarded as a serious matter. From long experience, the office manager, a calm Georgian named Samuel Mothner, had learned to recognize a close correlation between the current degree of public concern about the market and the number of walk-ins in his office, and at midday on May 28th the mob of them was so dense as to have, for his trained sensibilities, positively albatross-like connotations of disaster ahead.
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