In case you haven’t heard, there’s a rumor floating about that Ford is about to pull the plug on granny Mercury. That octogenarian brand has been limping along on life support – and getting Ford-generic medication – for years, but it’s still sad to see yet another American nameplate fade from existence.
We’ll do some further reminiscing about Mercury next week, but for right now we want your best arm-chair quarterbacking and for you to let us know – if Ford is really going to leave the gun but take the cannoli with Mercury – how could they have prevented this from happening?
I guess an additional question, and one that should be asked first, is Mercury worth saving? The brand was pumping out nearly half a million cars a year back in the eighties, but even then they were mostly just optioned-up versions of the same thing you could get at a Blue Oval dealership. Last year they managed to move less than a fifth of that number, few more than their upscale brother, Lincoln.
Despite the brand being an exercise in badge engineering, they managed to engineer some pretty cool badges. The Cougar, especially in XR7 guise was a pretty cool car that not only ran with the Mustangs, but didn’t give away that fact that it was in fact one of Ford’s ponies underneath.
Before that, Comets, Marauders and Turnpike Cruisers all satisfied Ford-loyal buyers who were looking for something a little extra in their cars, but couldn’t justify the cost or parking space of going to a Lincoln.
So there’s history, some pretty cool cars, but a lot of dreck too. Bobcats, LN7s and those LTDII-based Cougars come immediately to mind. But what if Ford realized that the Mercery brand, and it’s sales and service infrastructure was actually financially beneficial? What could they have done to make Mercury a more vibrant and relevant brand? Should they have made it the repository of Ford’s European models, ala Merkur? Maybe they could have made Mercury their hybrid-only brand, or they could have created an American BMW, offering only performance-luxury models and dumping the ladies room marketing.
What do you think, was Mercury worth saving, and if so, how would you have saved it?
Image sources: [sirchuckles via Flickr, Automotive.com]
Hooniverse Asks- How Could Ford Have Saved Mercury?
About
33 responses to “Hooniverse Asks- How Could Ford Have Saved Mercury?”
-
In my dream world, Mercury is a limited volume 2-car label for Ford. Cougars based on the Mustangs and Marauders on the AWD Fusion. Both with seriously differentiated bodies/interiors and only available with V8s. Priced in the mid-30s. Man… being an armchair auto executive is easy.
-
Bring back the Cougar is a must. Excitement about a brand generates sales faster and more efficiently than Courtney Cox being seen behind the wheel of one.Again I'd go retro on the Cougar as they do sooo well with the Mustang. The second car should well be Marauder BUT built on a stretched Mustang platform , not a Volvo front drive one. Yes,iIt could use eco-boost. Come to think of it, they would be the first Mustangs to use them. Then a small rear driver with sedan, wagon and coupé variants. Yes it's a lot like BeeeM but my Mercury brand would exude americana coolness, with that brash yet elegant muscle car vibe the original XR7 had. My personal car would be dark, dark blue with saddle interior and those great aluminium apliques the 'Stang has.
-
It's hard to see how they could have saved Mercury. The brand ladder idea just doesn't work anymore. With some Fords being just as fancy as Mercurys (like the Platinum and Titanium trim levels available on some models), they duplicate what a Mercury would be.
-
You make a good point about the breakdown of the brand ladder. I really blame GM more than anything else for this. As the overall market share shrank, it became more about giving each division a full line of cars to sell with too much meaningless overlap. Mercury was a little different because it was almost always intened to be a way to keep stand-alone Lincoln Mercury dealers in the black. For this reason I think the brand ladder concept worked a little better, or at least longer, there.
The Germans seem to be making the one-brand-fits-almost-all thing work. Sure they've had mis-steps but nothing catastrophic. The Japanese are getting more and more comfortable letting their mass market brands compete with their luxury ones. The thing is, they do it from different showrooms. Ford has been pushing the FLM steup for the past 4 years. Tough gig keeping the three viable in that environment.
-
-
It's septuagenarian, by the way. The first Mercury was in 1939, which makes it 71 years old.
-
Letting it die was the right thing to do. As you say, there was too much badge engineering for too long, and too much of it was insufficiently differentiated. Ford's reputation for building junk has improved significantly in recent years, but Mercury hasn't had nearly as much invested in the brand, and the name still conjures up images of the crap of yesteryear.
To overcome the hurdles listed above would require a major investment in both product and marketing. Ford may be doing better than the other US manufacturers, but that doesn't mean that they have a lot of capital on hand for investment. Focusing on the core Ford brand is the right thing to do in these tough economic times.
One could easily make the case that Ford killed Mercury long ago, they just chose to publicly acknowledge it now. -
I'd always hoped that they would bring back the Mercury head logo, and dump the lame waterfall "M". There's a dealer around here (David McDavid L-M in Plano) that has a neon Mercury head sign in their showroom, and it looks way cool.
-
Before McDavid dumped their Pontiac dealership in Irving, they had a neon Indian head perched atop a huge sign with a neon arrowhead pointing to the Indian. I guess McDavid dug those vintage style emblems. I know I do.
-
-
I owned a Capri and a Villager, both vehicles that you couldn't buy at a Ford dealer, so I guess that's my answer.
The Flex should have been a Mercury (Ford has too many people-movers in the line-up already) and the same with the upcoming C-Max. The tooling for the high headroom, easy-entry, boomer-friendly Ford 500 should have lived on as a Mercury-only Comet. The T-bird could have been restyled and updated as a new Cougar. The Ka should have become a new Capri. Amortization of existing tooling would have kept costs down so that some ad money could be spent.
Heck, they could have just re-badged Mazdas and Jaguars and done better. -
Hmmm… Have to go check out Jill Wagner's FB page later. She's the Mercury Girl, from the commercials (she was also on ABC's "Wipeout"). See if she has a post about it.
-
The only thing I would suggested would have been to utilize Ford's rest of the world portfolio to create a product line up different from the Ford mothership. Mondeo as the new Comet, The Aussie Falcon…..Cougar(naturally), C-max…..Villager,…and so on.
With Mercury's impending death, maybe Mr. Mullaly can apply this strategy to Lincoln?-
I agree. I always thought before the "One Ford" deal came out that Mercury should have been a clone to Ford's european product portfolio.
-
The bitchin' pictures you seem to find aren't loading on this post. Just jonesing for some good car pron……
-
-
The bigger question is why they would want to save it. Should have been axed years ago.
-
Well, the 'old logo' for mercury smartly shows the head of the 'god of speed'.
So obviously this should be the 'stripped down, pure speed, as close to F1 as possible' brand.
Am I wrong?
An american version of lotus could be fun, more economical gas-wise, but of course safe-niks would probably call it the 'mercury murderer'.
Actually, thats an awesome name.
Can I be CEO now?-
I'd buy a Mercury Murderer. How badass would that be? Make it a GT500KR rebadged as a Mercury or something.
-
-
Ford never knew what Mercury was supposed to be. In its early days, it never competed successfully with Olds and Buick, Pontiac being something of a non-factor in those years. By the late '50s, the intent was for it to move upmarket with the introduction of the Edsel brand, but that was so muddled by overlapping prices that by '61 the big Mercury ended up downsized and cheapened into the low-price field, similar to what Chrysler had done with the Dodge Dart series, as well as having to absorb the Comet from Edsel. The "glory days" of the '60s and '70s were really the anomaly; Mercury sales never recovered after 1978, the last year of the big barges and second last for the big mid-sizers (including the Cougar XR-7). Mercury has been gone from Canada for close to 10 years, and frankly, no one noticed.
-
Mercury managed to revive its sales quite well beginning in 1983. For the next five years or so, the brand sold in huge numbers because of the new aero Cougar, the Grand Marquis, the 1986 Sable, and, to a lesser extent, the Fox Marquis. However, the Lynx, Topaz, and Capri were always also-rans. Unfortunately, the latter-day glory times began to fade by around 1989.
-
-
Mercury should have only sold RWD vehicles. Pontiac could have been saved the same way.
-
They should have started a new add slogan, something like "Not your fathers Merc…." Oh wait. Nevermind.
-
Mercury has outlived its usefulness. The brand ladder is dead, and its current products are not sufficiently different from optioned up Fords. On the bright side, dropping Mercury frees up resources that could be used to remake Lincoln properly since that brand suffers a loss of direction as well.
-
Add a few inches in wheelbase to the Milan and ditch the Lincoln MKZ. Do the same with the Taurus while upping the equipment level and providing Mercury styling cues. This is the new Grand Marquis. Turn the Lincoln MKX into the new Mercury Colony Park. Make a Mustang-based Cougar with a little extra length and plenty of luxury goodies to go along with the sport.
-
Using Mercury to move a few captive imports and maybe some kind of Cougar is interesting. Maybe make it the retro brand. Regardless, there's consensus that a viable Mercury would need do be something other than Fords with different badges.
But I'd argue they'd need to go back something like 40 years to make a real difference for the brand itself.
My response has a twist: the problem with Mercury is Lincoln. Until the 60s, Lincoln was on the level of today's BMW 7 series or MB S-class. Since the 70s, they've descended to the level Mercury used to represent, i.e. A Better Ford.
Mercury still had a reason to exist while Ford products had little to no premium cache, but the last 4-5 years has seen a rise in quality of Ford's products, with all the marketing (rightly) focused on Ford. So now people know Fords are good and Lincolns are great. Mercury who?
It would take a generation to bring Lincoln up to a point that it'd open up a big enough gap for a bigger brand between it and Ford. -
Mercury should be kept as Ford's performance line. Instead of having a completely different lineup in the Mercury store, they would have small showrooms to themselves and offer hi-po models from Ford and Lincoln. Instead of a Ford SVT model, it would just be a Mercury, with alphanumeric designations. So instead of a Ford Mustang Shelby GT500, you'd have a Mercury GT500, or a Mercury RS250 (Focus RS), or whatever. Maybe that's crazy, but I like it. And bring back the damn Mercury head!
-
I agree with a lot of what you are saying but think Mustang and the performance angle is a bad example. For the most part people think Ford more than Mercury when it comes to performance. It would cost a lot to change that and the results would be mixed at best.
At least in the short term you'd be better off going with luxury. Make the Flex Titaniun the Mercury. Don't try to fool the public into thinking it's a different car. Keep it an honest "better Ford." Make it the urban "Eddie Bauer" package. Costs a little more than a Ford but gives you more. Leave the more differentiated offering to Lincoln. Perhaps the trophy wives won't mind showing up at the country club in a Ford if it's the Mercury one. -
You forgot the three most important reasons to buy a Mercury over a Ford. In general:
1) You get better service at a Lincoln Mercury dealer.
2) You get better service at a Lincoln Mercury dealer.
3) You get better service at a Lincoln Mercury dealer. -
The sad fact is that Ford doesn’t need two badge engineered brands making tarted up Fords. Sadly though, that is all that Mercury and Lincoln are as neither of them has a chassis or drivetrain that is unique to them. As Mercury was just being used as a brand that Lincoln dealers could sell to broaden their market ( like GMC is a way for non-Chevy GM dealers to sell trucks), it will not really be missed.
-
Mercury hasn't been much more than Fords with different grilles/tailights/wheelcovers for over 30 years. They tried a little harder with the Sable and Cougar, and I suppose the Nissan-based Villager was less of a joke than the Windstar, but that's about it.
Marketing the line to women in the last few years wasn't really a bad idea; at least it gave them something resembling an image. Oddly enough, Mercury promoted itself as "The Man's Car" in the late '60s. (Sadly, I know a guy in his mid twenties who actually bought a brand new Milan)
We all like the lament the passing of historic marques, and this last decade has been a rough one for enthusiasts. Plymouth, Olds, Pontiac and Mercury all produced a lot of great cars over the years. However, all of these brands were reduced to irrelevance for years, if not decades before their ultimate deaths. I'm not really sad to see any of them go, the motoring world is a better place with fewer Mountaineers, G6s, Aleros and Breezes on the road. -
Ford is the only one of the Big Three that wasn't on
life support recently.-
The way I see it, Ford was like someone who recognizes they have a problem and gets help with it, while GM and Chrysler are the people who show up in the emergency room with no insurance. Ford’s restructuring was on their own terms, not a federal task force’s.
-
-
Mercury has no place today, let it die.
If they had kept things the way they were intended it wouldn't be so bad:
Ford = economical
Lincoln = Luxury and enough power to haul it around
Mercury = Ford with Lincoln motor
When they started offering luxury packages and engine options on the Ford models is when Mercury became irrelevant -
Yes Mercury is worth saving. Oh and XR7 is BADASS!
-
You guys talk about things that are either expensive or doomed from the start or both. "Bring over all the Euro Fords just for Mercury." Right – do you know how much it costs to federalize a vehicle to meet US crash and emissions regs? Weighing that with what kind of volume they could reasonably move – even with the most aggressive integrated advertising campaign ever – is likely not enough to make that a profitable undertaking. Stretching the wheelbase of this or that car – again, no. Engineering, crash tests, extra tooling, a different line. Yeah, you do the math. Make Mercury RWD only? On what platform? The have ONE good RWD platform, and that's the S197. I think all of us can agree that it's time for the Panther to slip beneath the waves.
Mercury as a performance-only brand means they'd sell a total of like five cars. Performance enthusiasts already know where to go, and while that kind of vehicle adds panache, it's not a slipping-sales panacea. What Mercury needs is a hit product that appeals to the mainstream. One that's got a hook that's different from what you'll find at Ford.
Leave a Reply