Automaker Riding The Hip Parade
To Sell Its Crossover Entry, Ford Pulls Out All the Niche Showstoppers

By Sholnn Freeman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 28, 2006

The latest marketing campaign by Ford offers seats to a Beyonce Knowles concert in Mexico and sponsors a Web site where the R&B superstar belts love songs in Spanish. The face staring out from Ford print ads is Korean heartthrob Ahn Jae Wook, with the sales pitch written in Chinese.

Ford has also enlisted R&B singer Kelis and hip-hop car guru and deejay Funkmaster Flex to hype its new small sport-utility vehicle, the Edge. The company is putting up graffiti murals in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and New York. It has sponsored a whole evening's worth of shows on the CW television network, a cable channel that attracts a large African American audience.

Ford, the iconic American brand that invented the mainstream car market, is devoting considerable energy to attracting niche customers. Its foreign rivals, such as Toyota, have lured away a huge, and growing, chunk of the American market, forcing Ford to concentrate on the edges.

For the first time, Toyota outsold Ford in a U.S. monthly sales race this year. Analysts say the company is poised to overtake Ford next year as the No. 2 seller of vehicles in the United States. Toyota is also threatening to outmaneuver General Motors to become the No. 1 vehicle producer on a global basis.

"Ownership of even a smaller piece of the pie is still ownership," said Kenneth C. Herbst, assistant professor of marketing at the College of William and Mary. "There is still money to be made at any percentage of the market."

While many other customers have fled, lots of African Americans have stayed loyal to carmakers in Detroit. African American and Hispanic artists celebrate American car brands in music and culture. Hip-hop and R&B have given Cadillac new life with lyrical backing of the over-the-top Escalade SUV and the flashy Cadillac brand itself.

As part of the Ford campaign, Kelis will pump up the Edge with a song:

So clean in my Edge

Steady headed to the spot

Speakers bump thump thump

All you hearin' on the block

I live life loud

Cause that's the only way to live it

I push it to the Edge

Never stop at the limit.

Ford will sponsor a sweepstakes on Spanish-language Univision.com where the winner will see Knowles perform live at a concert in Monterrey, Mexico, in July.

Ford's marketers also think they've got a strong shot with Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese customers and younger people who don't feel the built-up antipathy toward American brands. The ads featuring Wook, a wildly popular soap opera star and musician, are running in major Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese newspapers and magazines around the country.

Ford is using remixes of Wook's music in commercials for the Edge that will play on Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese cable stations that cater to those groups, mainly on the West Coast. Ford is also putting new music from Wook up on a company Web site.

Ford has a lot of mainstream marketing for the Edge, too. Leading up to New Year's Eve, it is sponsoring the 585-square-foot super-sign billboard in New York's Times Square -- the largest curved electronic billboard in the world. Still, the campaign is one of the company's largest efforts to target African American and Asian American customers

With the Edge, Ford is trying to break into a stronghold of Japan automakers, the market for lightweight, fuel-efficient sport-utility vehicles, called crossovers. The crossover market has grown from 7.2 percent of the U.S. market to 10.6 percent in 2006, according to Edmunds.com. Next year, the crossover segment is expected to grow to 12 percent.

The segment, ruled by Toyota Highlander and RAV4 and Honda Pilot and CR-V, is highly competitive. Mazda recently introduced the CX-9, and a smaller model, the CX-7, is due next year. Audi has the Q7 crossover, its first SUV. The Edge is priced from $25,000 to $30,000, in line with the RAV4 and CR-V.

The segment, once ignored by Detroit, is getting tougher. "These are products designed from the ground up to compete against the import crossovers," said Jesse Toprak, director of industry analysis at Edmunds. "That's why we see such strong marketing efforts behind the Edge."

Ford has a lot riding on the Edge as it tries to wean itself from large SUV profits. The automaker has leveraged virtually everything it owns, from car factories to the car logos, to borrow enough money to rebuild the company. Ford also wants to change the company's image as a proliferator of gas-guzzling SUVs.

"The great thing about the Edge is it really does change people's perceptions about Ford," said Jeri Ward, the Edge's marketing manager at Ford. "It's key to have products that break through and get their attention."

As Toyota grabs a larger share of the U.S. market, it has been at pains to show in its own marketing that it has deep American roots. Though locked in competition, Alan R. Mulally, Ford's new chief executive, has said he likes the way Toyota runs its business. Last week, he met with top officials at Toyota and could be interested in working with the Japanese automaker on joint projects.