TriShield

Lincoln Announces Name Change, Nobody Cares



By Derek Kreindler on December 3, 2012

The big auto news on Twitter this morning – Lincoln is now known as “Lincoln Motor Company”, and they’ll be rolling out the name change with a brand new Superbowl ad.

That’s great, but where’s the product?

As it stands now, Lincoln’s product lineup is in shambles. The new MKZ may be stunning and beautifully appointed, but the existence of the Ford Fusion makes the car irrelevant, and the $50,000 pricetag for well equipped models is an absolute farce given the strength of every other competitor in the segment. The same can be said for…just about every other vehicle in the brand’s lineup, where the Ford equivalent is equally appealing and far cheaper. Even the Navigator, which at one time had some real street cred, failed to launch, and allowed the Cadillac Escalade to become the déclassé luxury vehicle of choice.

Legions of people with much more experience and wisdom have written about Lincoln’s pitfalls and how the brand can save itself from oblivion, so I’ll steer clear of those prognostications. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that this whole retro theme (which Lincoln has been playing up heavily at auto shows with displays of classic vehicles) is a non-starter. Nobody outside of Ford is going to use the name “Lincoln Motor Company” and the retro theme clashes directly with the tech-heavy, futuristic-looking product lineup being offered.

As it stands now, Lincoln is best known for 1) the Town Cars that pick people up from the airport and 2) the 1963 Continental that Johnny Drama drove on Entourage. There’s going to be a long and arduous road ahead for Lincoln if they want to make any kind of headway – and a name change should be the last thing on their radar.

But that’s not all. Automotive News is reporting that Lincoln is showing their desperation by announcing an initative to “crowdsource” their Superbowl ads, with talk show host Jimmy Fallon acting as “curator”. When car companies start hiring barely relevant B-List celebrities and throw around buzzwords like “curate”, it may as well be a death rattle.

TriShield

Lincoln Is Screwed And Jimmy Fallon Won’t Save Them



Matt Hardigree
DEC 3, 2012 3:40 PM

Ford's been on an amazing streak building great cars that manage to sell to the masses. It's been a single brand turnaround that deserves all the praise we've been giving it. Ford's "premium" Lincoln brand is entirely made up of rebadged Fords that are slightly nicer and unreasonably more expensive. It's been a predictable failure

Today, the company relaunched the brand as the Lincoln Motor Company in an effort to get people to buy their cars. They also hired Jimmy Fallon to come up with a Super Bowl advertisement for them. All of this is being done to get younger people to think about the brand before dramatically changing their products.

That's backwards and it won't work. I'm sorry, your Super Bowl ad could be Sofia Vergara, nude, reading Neruda poems in the original Spanish on the hood of an MKZ and I'm still not thinking about the car.

Pity Ford execs Jim Farley and Mark Fields. They know they need a luxury brand and they know they'll never have the name ID they've got with Lincoln, so they've convinced Ford CEO Alan Mulally to let them "fix" Lincoln.

But this fix is on a budget and, while I'm sure there are some desperate skunkworks efforts to build a new fleet of cars that are reasonably different from the Ford platform they're based on, it isn't happening fast enough.

Instead, the current Lincoln stable is an expensive Ford Taurus, an expensive Ford Edge, an expensive Ford Flex, and a flagship that's just an expensive Ford Expedition with a lot of chrome. They didn't show any of these cars at the LA Auto Show this last week because they know they're crap.

What they did show is a lot of the new Lincoln MKZ, a handsome take on the Ford Fusion we love.

So what's wrong? It's a good looking car built on a strong platform that offers at least one larger (though largely superfluous) engine and a few more luxury touches, but the price difference isn't worth it. The Fusion already looks luxurious and a similarly optioned Titanium Fusion is around $9,000 cheaper. I'd also argue the Fusion is more attractive.

Lincoln's other plans for the brand include a 24/7 personal concierge to walk people through the buying process and the "Lincoln Date Night" where they will literally buy you dinner so you'll spend the night with them.

Even better, buy a car before January 3rd and they'll give you jewelry, sunglasses, wine, or a one-night stay at the Ritz Carlton. We'd take the Ritz Carlton if only because it gives you the chance to get fucked in a hotel room and not just at the dealership.

All of this gets capped off by an ad campaign that starts with poor quality Imported From Detroit/Levi's pastiche and ends with a Fallon-helmed Super Bowl ad. Here's the pitch for it, by the way:

Fallon will curate and write the Super Bowl ad via social media. He will tell the Lincoln story from tweets from the public about the brand.

I like Fallon. I think he's smart enough to surround himself with even smarter, funnier people. The Roots make a great show band. But no one thinks of Fallon as a youthful influencer, which is what Lincoln wants. If he was, at least one person I know would have a Capital One Venture Card.

A car is too expensive of a purchase for anyone to get persuaded into buying it because they saw someone's tweet-as-read-by-Fallon. Even if it does get them in the door — and I doubt it — they're just going to find something not as good as everything being promised.

The lesson of Cadillac's resurgance is that good product trumps good marketing when it comes to selling luxury cars. The Caddy-that-zigs Catera was a rebadged flop. Then Cadillac built the CTS, a car that did zig, and found a market. Now Cadillac can sell cars like the XTS (a rebadged Buick) as part of a broad portfolio of desirable vehicles.

I don't want Lincoln to be a failure. I don't even mind them renaming it Lincoln Motor Company and I applaud the marketing guy who actually charged money for that kind of advice. Selling cars is difficult and I'm lucky that it's not my job to try to figure out how to do it.

This campaign, though, is nothing without product. The only thing I can imagine that makes sense is that Farley/Fields realized the only way to save the brand until they had truly good, unique product was to spend so much money rebranding Lincoln that the rest of the company wouldn't be able to stomach wasting it by burying it in a grave next to Mercury under a tombstone with slightly more leather.

I mean, why else do you basically give $7 million to Jimmy Fallon?

TriShield

What Does American Luxury Even Mean?



By Derek Kreindler on December 4, 2012

Nearly everyone was unanimous in their assessment that Lincoln’s re-branding campaign is an unmitigated disaster unfolding in slow motion; from the name change to Lincoln Motor Company to the bizarre tie-up with Jimmy Fallon and the marketing-buzzword laden BS the whole thing reeks of inaction disguised in the form of sophisticated marketing efforts.

The most interesting angle in this mess is the fact that American luxury cars are in such a shambles that Lincoln’s biggest threat doesn’t really come from Cadillac, but from Ford itself.

Cadillac and Lincoln are on two entirely different planets. Lincoln is stuck under the shadow of its sibling, the Blue Oval. Ford’s offering are mechanically identical, packed with nearly all of the same content and retail for thousands less – with the possibility of carrying a more attractive emblem on the hood. None of Lincoln’s product offer any kind of unique proposition. The best Lincoln on sale today is actually Korean, as the Hyundai Equus does a damn good job of approximating the driver and passenger experience of a classic Town Car. Make of that what you will.

At least Cadillac has some kind of vision. The Standard of the World really wants to be better than Europe’s finest, and the ATS is a fine effort, except for one small detail; the only reason it’s been able to grab the brass ring from the BMW 3-Series is because the current car is one of the weaker efforts put forth by the Roundel. Put an E90 328i next to any ATS and you understand that the ATS comes pretty close to being a great car, but misses the mark.

The rest of Cadillac’s lineup is doesn’t exactly hold to it though. The CTS is long in the tooth, the V Series are irrelevant to all but the most diehard car geeks and the XTS is still languishing in premium sedan obscurity. About the only car in the lineup with any kind of social capital is the Escalade, which endures as the vulgarian chariot of choice for those with more money than discretion.

The only real concrete vision of what an American luxury car should be comes from Chrysler, of all places. The 300 makes a bold visual statement, comes with a range of sophisticated powertrain options and finally has an interior that is worthy of being praised. And what value, too. A base 300, with the 292 horsepower V6 and 8-speed automatic transmission, starts at a hair under $30,000. I don’t even think I’d get the V8, heretical as it may be. It won’t have the driving dynamics of an import car, but when was an American car ever supposed to be able to clock off a sub 8-minute ‘Ring time? Best of all, it occupies that long-dormant niche that used to be the domain of Oldsmobile and even Pontiac. It was a luxury car that told everyone you’d arrived, but wasn’t sufficiently extravagant that your clients felt that they were being fleeced. No wonder both my Grandfathers were Mopar men.

Rawr256

I think with some of the Cadillac comments it kind of hits on what is wrong with Lincoln, anything they already offer, you can already buy nearly the same thing from Ford.

If you were shopping GM there is only one CTS. Thought powertrain may be shared with other vehicles, everything else about the car is different. It makes you feel like when you drop the money for it you actually have something different than a Malibu or Impala.

The Ford's have become nice cars, although pricey in most cases (the new SHO for example) and though I have not honestly looked at Lincoln's as of late, just hearing that they could be a good jump more expensive than the Ford counter part that is nearly identical turns me off completely.

LS1vazquez

The primary problem with Lincoln in my opinion is that it's suffering the identity crisis that most of the major labels started to take on from the late 90's, early 2000's platform sharing issue. The "Like a Ford, only more upscale" approach isn't working because they are targeting the same buyers who are already cross shopping a Ford.

The best approach for Lincoln is to target the areas that cause people not to purchase a Ford, and target that demographic. We already know that Lincoln is a luxury brand and not a big volume seller, and it doesn't appear that Ford needs Lincoln to be that anyway. They can turn that into the advantage and push experimental designs and design architectures that primarily wouldn't appeal to Ford buyers. The whole point is to appeal to people on both ends of the bell curve that would otherwise shop a Ford.

There is absolutely no reason why a car like Lincoln should go defunct over an identity crisis, because Lincoln does have an identity. They are the premier all American luxury land tanks. That's how people identify with a Lincoln. Hell, when the North Korean dictator Kim-Jong died, who was about as anti-American as it got, it was impeccably restored Lincolns that carried him to his grave, not some knock off Soviet-era me-too car. That's WHAT Lincoln is.

7998

iTrader: (1)

This like pulling a fire extinguisher to put out a forest fire.
Lincoln is dead. While individuality may be in vogue it is nothing more than a marketing gimmick.
If someone is going to spend $50k on a sedan are they going to buy a BMW 3 series, C-class, A4, CTS, or a plastic chromed Ford Fusion or Taurus?
There is nothing truly unique or high end about what Lincoln offers that really couldn't be offered in the Ford for less.

D3VIL

Wasn't this exactly why GM had to get rid of 4 of it's car companies?

Because they were selling just rebadged cars and wasting production money:

Trailblazer, Envoy, Isuzu Ascender, Buick Rainier, all THE exact same!

Who in their right minds thought they'd all sell successfully?

I can only understand 2 brand car companies like Nissan/Infinit, Toyota/Lexus, Honda/Acura because those companies really have a decent sized gap between a regular accord(for example) and a TL, the TL's interior is sexy, the accord's interior is barely good enough so you don't complain about your brand new purchase. Same cannot be said about Ford and Lincoln unfortunately

BanditTA

iTrader: (3)

What Lincoln does or has done isn't much different than what Acura (Honda), Infinity (Nissan) and Lexus (Toyota) have done or still do to this day.

When we bought our CTS we didn't even bother to look at those three or a Lincoln for that sole reason alone. If I'm dropping that much money on a car, it better not be a rebadge.