The Ford Taurus: Is the Magic Still There?
Ford Motor will announce this week that it will rename its Five Hundred sedan the Taurus, the company’s popular-selling car in the 1980s. I don’t know about you, but resurrecting a car associated with a bulbous design and rental car agencies is probably not what the auto retail market demands.
My memories of the Taurus are when I was 16. Every time I drove my Taurus on the highway, the car stalled and I skirted death. At the time, the company claimed this ubiquitous problem stemmed from a glitch with the car’s catalytic converter.
Today, while Ford is trying its luck again on a 25-year-old legacy, auto makers like Toyota are introducing sleek, designs this week at the Chicago Auto Motor show tailored to individual customers segments. For example, Toyota launched the Scion for the young, digitally savvy customer. Such moves are contributing to what my colleague Liz Glagowski blogged about yesterday—that automobile imports reached a record high of 40.4 percent of U.S. sales in January.
Toyota is in tune with its consumers' needs, but Ford can't seem to connect with its customers. William J. McEwen says in his book Married to the Brand, that brands fail when they continue to head in the wrong direction without concentrating on building brand relationships. In Ford’s case, the auto maker is concentrating on registering a brand name, rather than providing products that customers can connect with.
A brand must be credible and able to personally draw in customers. The 1980s version of the Taurus doesn’t fulfill that requirement.
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