Originally Posted By: demarpaint
I was a big Ford fan boy, this is just another stupid move for them imo. I don't care for any of their offerings anymore.
You know, I find this interesting. That was the exact opposite Ford was taking 8-9 years ago.
Back in the late, late 2000s, I was a subcontracting consultant for buyer behavior for a "Big Three" company. It was fairly easy to deduce it was Ford (walking out into the parking lot would confirm this easily). Anyway, the company was trying to figure out how to connect with the "newer generations" etc. Basically, they could not figure out why/how the "general" buyer (the 90% of the population) would not engage with the company directly and did no trust their information. They could get this weird 10% to interact, but they drove older vehicles, were more likely to do repairs themselves, tended to buy used cars, and their daily driver was either a Full-Sized Truck, Mustang, Miata or similar. A lot of Civic Si owners at the time too in our data. Anyway this 10% in our data was one of the most "trusted" sources with a high influence factor. It wasn't that they could make the 90% buy a car, but they were very good at getting the 90% to consider the car. So if the 90% was looking at a Corolla or Civic (and for was not on the list), they they were very good at getting the Focus, etc on that list to check out. So the concept was to get the "car guru" talking about your model as they has the most social influence in recommending that a 90% would interact with a brand/dealer.
Long story short, our recommendation was that you mix in true enthusiast models across the line up (rather than a single "mustang option" as a means of connecting with those that followed a brand other than #lifestyle. The 90% did not care if it was an S, SE, Ti, or ST but the "guru" would be talking about the sub-model that interested them and they would have the Fiesta or other make name everywhere. Best of all, they were very brand loyal compared to the 90%. Raptor/ST models came out after this and while I don't think that our group really "created" this concept, as there were several analysis groups doing this... the data was fairly strong so I am guessing Ford/other saw this trend developing in the data.
I am curious to see how the buyer data has evolved. 10 years is a long time in the data world and I am out of it. Anyway, Ford *tends* to be ahead of the market research side (they shine there) but still, this looks like a decision designed to "shake things up" for hedge funds rather than a long-term strategy.
