To move ahead, Ford turns back

By WARREN BROWN
WASHINGTON POST
CHICAGO -- It's a small thing to the outside world. It alone won't open shuttered assembly plants, bring back lost jobs or revive corporate profitability. But Ford's recent announcement that it is resurrecting the names of the Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable passenger cars gives hope to the company's beleaguered dealers that someone at Ford, at last, is listening.
The announcement during the media days of the Chicago Auto Show was made by Mark Fields, Ford's president of company operations in the Americas and the executive in charge of Ford's daunting corporate restructuring efforts.
Fields is listening. He has even jettisoned the part of his employment contract that allowed him to fly to his Florida home on weekends on one of Ford's corporate jets. And many dealers credit Fields for being a realist in taking other steps to help set Ford aright.
But the man of the moment in the dealers' minds is Alan Mulally, Ford's new president and chief executive.
Mulally joined Ford in September after serving as president and chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, a job in which he learned a thing or two about sales and product branding.
A few days before the opening of the Chicago Auto Show, Mulally was in Las Vegas at the National Automobile Dealers Association in a closed-door meeting with Ford's dealer council members. It was no enviable task, confronting a group of retailers who were complaining about a dearth of hot-selling vehicles, rising dealership operational costs, corporate plans to shutter many Ford dealerships -- and trying to explain how a once-formidable American corporate giant lost 12.7 billion in 2006.
But several Ford dealers I encountered at Super Bowl parties after that closed Sunday meeting were high -- on Mulally. They liked his frankness and his honesty in admitting the company's mistakes, such as taking the Taurus and Sable brands off the market -- "the damned stupidest thing Ford has ever done," said a Ford dealer from Virginia.
Big mistake
Whether Mulally has used similar language in characterizing the decision to dump the Taurus and Sable is unknown. But that he thinks getting rid of those car brands was a big mistake is no secret.
In Chicago, Fields described the dump-Taurus decision as an unfortunate, costly assault on brand equity.
"Honestly, we never should have walked away from the tremendous equity we built in the Taurus and Sable name," Fields told reporters here. "We believe it takes more than two years of consistent marketing and literally hundreds of millions of dollars for brand awareness to reach appropriate levels," he said.
But Ford, dealing with heavy financial losses and now mortgaged to the hilt, is quite literally in a race for its life. It does not have time to waste. And with Mulally positioning Ford to invest in new products, it does not have money to waste, either. For those reasons, Fields said, taking two years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build new brand identities on the graves of old brands that should not have been killed "is a strategy that will not work for us."
So, what had been the Ford Five Hundred -- a good-quality full-size passenger car that lacked adequate market appeal -- will be freshened and rechristened the new Ford Taurus. What is now the Mercury Montego will be renamed the Mercury Sable. And Ford is changing the labeling of the Freestyle -- a good crossover utility vehicle whose ambiguous name did absolutely nothing for sales -- and replacing it with a new badge, the Taurus X.
Overdue common sense
This is more than a cosmetic romp. It's an exercise in common sense long overdue at Ford. The Taurus first appeared in 1985 as a 1986 model, heralding what had been called the jellybean look, a deliberate turn away from the boxy, go-nowhere styling of the 1970s. The Taurus and later its sibling Sable were hits. Subsequent redesigns of Taurus and Sable models were less fortunate, and sales fell.
But instead of doing what Toyota had done with the Camry and what Honda had done with the Accord, which was to try again to get things right when they'd gone wrong, Ford's executives backed away from Taurus-Sable redevelopment and marketing and let the brands die.
It was a dumb thing to do, as the Virginia Ford dealer said. But at least, now, the company has a leader who is willing to admit it was dumb and who is eager to correct the error. Sometimes, the way forward is through previous mistakes.