Ford Wastes Millions on a Beaten Brand

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Sep 11, 12:07PM EDT · Published Sep 11, 9:45AM EDT

Quick Read

The first wave of Ford Motor Co.’s (NYSE: F) new marketing campaign has little to say about the company’s recent past and its likely future.
It fails to show off Ford’s successes.

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F | F Price Prediction) has launched its Ready Set Ford marketing campaign, which will cost it tens of millions of dollars. It came less than a day after Ford made its 104th recall this year. That number is unfathomable. The first wave of the campaign’s effort is confusing. Someone driving a pickup saves a running bull. A man is running without a car. A race car is driving. Someone jumps into the water. These must be the ways people use their Ford vehicles now, or might use them in the future.

The fact is that Ford has little to say about its recent past and its likely future. It is still a gasoline-powered vehicle company, particularly because of the spectacular sales of its pickups and SUVs. In the United States, its F-150 comprises 38% of company sales. The full-size pickup has been the bestselling vehicle in America for over four decades. Ford is the fossil fuel champion. A real champion.

In the first eight months of the year, 4% of Ford’s total U.S. vehicle sales were electric vehicles (EVs). Getting there cost tens of billions of dollars, and will cost another $5 billion this year. It does not appear there are any EVs in the new advertising.

Ford has run into the buzz saws of the end of the $7,500 EV tax credit, a remarkably crowded U.S. EV market, a possible invasion of Chinese EVs, and what iSeeCars says will be a U.S. EV market share of new car sales that has been 8% recently, and will fall to 4% from 2026 through 2028.

Ford should promise a future of better-built cars that don’t fall apart. It should show off new non-EV products, and not cattle. It should show its BlueCruise hands-free product, which has received excellent reviews. A running man cannot use the feature.

Whether Ford makes it as a global car company should not be what people see when they see the BlueOval. They should see the F-150, Mustang, and Lincoln Navigator. Ford has some winners. It has decided that people don’t care about them.

Did QuantumScape Just Single-Handedly Revive the EV Market?

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.