Business Adventures

by John Brooks

  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. “Frankly, we dabbled,” Wallace says. “It was a dragnet operation.” Among the odds and ends that the dragnet dredged up were some that, when pieced together, led the researchers to report:

  By looking at those respondents whose annual incomes range from $4,000 to $11,000, we can make an … observation. A considerable percentage of these respondents [to a question about their ability to mix cocktails] are in the “somewhat” category on ability to mix cocktails.… Evidently, they do not have much confidence in their cocktail-mixing ability. We may infer that these respondents are aware of the fact that they are in the learning process. They may be able to mix Martinis or Manhattans, but beyond these popular drinks they don’t have much of a repertoire.

  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.

  Early in 1956, Wallace set about summing up all of his department’s findings in a report to his superiors in the Special Products Division. Entitled “The Market and Personality Objectives of the E-Car” and weighty with facts and statistics—though generously interspersed with terse sections in italics or capitals from which a hard-pressed executive could get the gist of the thing in a matter of seconds—the report first indulged in some airy, skippable philosophizing and then got down to conclusions:

  What happens when an owner sees his make as a car which a woman might buy, but is himself a man? Does this apparent inconsistency of car image and the buyer’s own characteristics affect his trading plans? 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.

  It should be noted that “conflict,” as used here, can be of two kinds. 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. To this the report replied, “Capitalize on imagery weakness of competition,” and went on to urge that in the matter of age the E-Car should take an imagery position neither too young nor too old but right alongside that of the middling Olds-mobile; that in the matter of social class, not to mince matters, “the E-Car might well take a status position just below Buick and Oldsmobile”; and that in the delicate matter of sex it should try to straddle the fence, again along with the protean Olds. In sum (and in Wallace typography):

  The most advantageous personality for the E-Car might well be THE SMART CAR FOR THE YOUNGER EXECUTIVE OR PROFESSIONAL FAMILY ON ITS WAY UP.

  Smart car: recognition by others of the owner’s good style and taste.

  Younger: appealing to spirited but responsible adventurers.

  Executive or professional: millions pretend to this status, whether they can attain it or not.

  Family: not exclusively masculine; a wholesome “good” role.

  On Its Way Up: “The E-Car has faith in you, son; we’ll help you make it!”

  Before spirited but responsible adventurers could have faith in the E-Car, however, it had to have a name. 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 1918 until his death, in 1943; 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 1955, 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. At a certain drowsy point in one session, somebody suddenly called a halt to the card-flipping and asked, in an incredulous tone, “Didn’t I see ‘Buick’ go by two or three cards back?” Everybody looked at Wallace, the impresario of the sessions. 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. “We should like this name … to convey, through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design,” Wallace wrote to Miss Moore, achieving a certain feeling of elegance himself. If it is asked who among the gods of Dearborn had the inspired and inspiriting idea of enlisting Miss Moore’s services in this cause, the answer, according to Wallace, is that it was no god but the wife of one of his junior assistants—a young lady who had recently graduated from Mount Holyoke, where she had heard Miss Moore lecture. Had her husband’s superiors gone a step further and actually adopted one of Miss Moore’s many suggestions—Intelligent Bullet, for instance, or Utopian Turtletop, or Bullet Cloisonné, or Pastelogram, or Mongoose Civique, or Andante con Moto (“Description of a good motor?” Miss Moore queried in regard to this last)—there is no telling to what heights the E-Car might have risen, but the fact is that they didn’t. Dissatisfied with both the poet’s ideas and their own, the executives in the Special Products Division next called in Foote, Cone & Belding, the advertising agency that had
lately been signed up to handle the E-Car account. With characteristic Madison Avenue vigor, Foote, Cone & Belding organized a competition among the employees of its New York, London, and Chicago offices, offering nothing less than one of the brand-new cars as a prize to whoever thought up an acceptable name. In no time at all, Foote, Cone & Belding had eighteen thousand names in hand, including Zoom, Zip, Benson, Henry, and Drof (if in doubt, spell it backward). 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. “There you are,” a Foote, Cone man said triumphantly, flopping a sheaf of papers on the table. “Six thousand names, all alphabetized and cross-referenced.”

  A gasp escaped Krafve. “But we don’t want six thousand names,” he said. “We only want one.”

  The situation was critical, because the making of dies for the new car was about to begin and some of them would have to bear its name. On a Thursday, Foote, Cone & Belding canceled all leaves and instituted what is called a crash program, instructing its New York and Chicago offices to set about independently cutting down the list of six thousand names to ten and to have the job done by the end of the weekend. 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. “Corsair seemed to be head and shoulders above everything else,” Wallace says. “Along with other factors in its favor, it had done splendidly in the sidewalk interviews. The free associations with Corsair were rather romantic—‘pirate,’ ‘swashbuckler,’ things like that. For its opposite, we got ‘princess,’ or something else attractive on that order. Just what we wanted.”

  Corsair or no Corsair, the E-Car was named the Edsel in the early spring of 1956, though the public was not informed until the following autumn. 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. In President Ford’s absence, the meeting was conducted by Breech, who had become chairman of the board in 1955, and his mood that day was brusque, and not one to linger long over swashbucklers and princesses. After hearing the final choices, he said, “I don’t like any of them. Let’s take another look at some of the others.” So they took another look at the favored rejects, among them the name Edsel, which, in spite of the three Ford brothers’ expressed interpretation of their father’s probable wishes, had been retained as a sort of anchor to windward. Breech led his associates in a patient scrutiny of the list until they came to “Edsel.” “Let’s call it that,” Breech said with calm finality. 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.

  As Wallace wrote to Miss Moore a while later: “We have chosen a name.… It fails somewhat of the resonance, gaiety, and zest we were seeking. 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.”

  IT may be assumed that word of the naming of the E-Car spread a certain amount of despair among the Foote, Cone & Belding backers of more metaphorical names, none of whom won a free car—a despair heightened by the fact that the name “Edsel” had been ruled out of the competition from the first. But their sense of disappointment was as nothing compared to the gloom that enveloped many employees of the Special Products Division. Some felt that the name of a former president of the company, who had sired its current president, bore dynastic connotations that were alien to the American temper; others, who, with Wallace, had put their trust in the quirks of the mass unconscious, believed that “Edsel” was a disastrously unfortunate combination of syllables. What were its free associations? Pretzel, diesel, hard sell. What was its opposite? It didn’t seem to have any. 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, in fact, was so well pleased with the way matters had turned out that when, at eleven o’clock on the morning of November 19, 1956, after a long summer of thoughtful silence, the Ford Company released to the world the glad tidings that the E-Car had been named the Edsel, he accompanied the announcement with a few dramatic flourishes of his own. On the very stroke of that hour on that day, the telephone operators in Krafve’s domain began greeting callers with “Edsel Division” instead of “Special Products Division”; all stationery bearing the obsolete letterhead of the division vanished and was replaced by sheaves of paper headed “Edsel Division”; and outside the building a huge stainless-steel sign reading “EDSEL DIVISION” rose ceremoniously to the rooftop. 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. In the strict secrecy of the Dearborn test track, vibrant, almost full-fledged Edsels, with their name graven on their superstructures, were already being road-tested; Brown and his fellow stylists were already well along with their designs for the next year’s Edsel; recruits were already being signed up for an entirely new organization of retail dealers to sell the Edsel to the public; and Foote, Cone & Belding, having been relieved of the burden of staging crash programs to collect names and crash programs to get rid of them again, was already deep in schemes for advertising the Edsel, under the personal direction of a no less substantial pillar of his trade than Fairfax M. Cone, the agency’s head man. In planning his campaign, Cone relied heavily on what had come to be called the “Wallace prescription”; that is, the formula for the Edsel’s personality as set forth by Wallace back in the days before the big naming bee—“The smart car for the younger executive or professional family on its way up.” So enthusiastic was Cone about the prescription that he accepted it with only one revision—the substitution of “middle-income” family for “younger executive,” his hunch being that there were more middle-income families around than young executives, or even people who thought they were young executives. In an expansive mood, possibly induced by his having landed an account that was expected to bring billings of well over ten million dollars a year, Cone described to reporters on several occasions the kind of campaign he was plotting for the Edsel—quiet, self-assured, and avoiding as much as possible the use of the adjective “new,” which, though it had an obvious application to the product, he considered rather lacking in cachet. Above all, the campaign was to be classic in its calmness. “We think it would be awful for the advertising to compete with the car,” Cone told the press. “We hope that no one will ever ask, ‘Say, did you see that Edsel ad?’ in any newspaper or magazine or on television, but, instead, that hundreds of thousands of people will say, and say again, ‘Man, did you read about that Edsel?’ or ‘Did you see that car?’ This is the difference between advertising and selling.” Evidently enough, Cone felt confident about the campaign and the Edsel. Like a chess master who has no doubt that he will win, he could afford to explicate the brilliance o
f his moves even as he made them.

  Automobile men still talk, with admiration for the virtuosity displayed and a shudder at the ultimate outcome, of the Edsel Division’s drive to round up retail dealers. 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, 1957—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. “We simply have to have quality dealers with quality service facilities,” Krafve said. “A customer who gets poor service on an established brand blames the dealer. On an Edsel, he will blame the car.” The goal of twelve hundred was a high one, for no dealer, quality or not, can afford to switch makes lightly. 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.