were all about rolling to the rear. The car represented tried and tired conventional engineering wrapped in subjectively unattractive design billed as futuristic. Fueled by engineering sameness, it was promoted with depressingly conventional marketing strategies. As if to echo General of the Army Omar Bradley’s famous 1951 rebuke concerning Douglas MacArthur’s desire to extend the Korean War into China—“It is the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” Time magazine in 1958 called the Edsel, “The wrong car for the wrong market at the wrong time.”
Time was not just blowing rhetorical smoke. For instance, when the Edsel was on the drawing board, consumers seemed intensely focused on buying “big” and “bigger.” By 1958, when the car finally limped off the assembly line, these same consumers were starting to look for smaller economy cars. The public’s interest in gigantic, big-fin, chrome-encrusted, gas-guzzling cars was going stale. New, smaller, future-focused cars included the VW Beetle, the Nash Rambler, and the Studebaker Lark.
Congenitally conservative and shackled to the glacial pace of bureaucratic decision-making concerning matters of design and technology, Ford was innovating backward, not forward. It was not just that Ford suffered from an epidemic of wry neck, in which every head was turned backward and incapable of looking forward, the company’s processes—planning, design, production—moved at the pace of a mastodon. Massive time lags between every step meant research findings were about as fresh as moldy bread by the time it came to apply them. During the two interminable years between conception and delivery, consumer trends toward smaller economy cars roared in like a rip tide, pulling the Edsel deeper out into the briny depths of oblivion.
The Edsel emerges for us as an argument for the kind of research approach I have used for such clients as The Coca-Cola Company, McDonald’s, Microsoft, American Express, Verizon, KPMG, Nike, and many others. Importantly, this was not research, but pre-search—hypothesis and scenario testing rolled out into the future, pulling consumers as far forward as possible in their perception and thinking, driving market research to anticipate rather than react to consumer trends. Asking consumers, in effect, what will you want instead of what did you want helps us understand perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors and, most importantly, what might move consumers going forward.
The lesson: Aim your research and thinking forward, not backward, and put to work the same level of agility in dealing with change that today’s consumers bring to their everyday lives.
Lesson Four: Transform Your Business
I argue in this book for a wide-angle view of innovation, far wider than your company’s products, services, and technologies. Successful innovation today must take in a company’s business model as well as the platform on which that model is implemented. Today, it is the platform that will drive breakthroughs and success.
Consider an example detailed in Ron Adner’s excellent book, The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation. In the 1990s, Michelin innovated the self-inflating run-flat tire. Sounds like a breakthrough if there ever was one. But Adner shows how Michelin’s innovation process failed to contemplate, much less understand, how innovation must be adopted by the larger ecosystem into which it is delivered. Michelin’s 1990s innovation was a technological breakthrough, but the innovation fell short of commercial breakthrough because repair shops, auto dealers, and auto manufacturers were not prepared to accommodate run-flat tires. Failure to innovate beyond the confines of your business model—failure to innovate the required platform out in the ecosystem—will doom success.
Return to the Edsel. The “car of the future” brought with it widespread confusion in terms of workers, parts, and processes. Moreover, self-sabotaging mistakes—the misguided attempt to build the “new” Edsel on assembly lines also assigned to turn out “old” standbys—landed right inside the Edsel engines and drive trains, which became proverbial for their unreliable mechanics, missing parts, and other failures of engineering and quality control. It got so bad that Ford began selling Edsels with a kit of extra parts packed in the trunk, along with instructions to dealer service departments on how to use them.
And, oh yes, the dealers. Ford wanted to brand the Edsel as special. Instead of making it special, however, Ford snatched away ownership of the Edsel from its own dealership system and added a new category of dealer to sell the Edsel exclusively. This uniquely self-inflicted orgy of cannibalism ate away at Ford’s own long-established selling system. One thinks of the ancient Roman emperor who, when the people turned against him, settled into a warm bath, sliced open the veins in his wrist, and bled himself peacefully to death. Just so, Ford sapped away the force of synergy by not merely failing to leverage its existing dealer network, but by making such leverage impossible. This setup heaped inertia where momentum should have been at the very moment of the Edsel’s launch.
And for those cars that did manage to drive off the showroom floor and into some suburban garage, their owners were quickly confronted by two things: electrical and mechanical problems plus dealer mechanics unequipped to handle them. The much-ballyhooed and universally hated “Tele-Touch Transmissions” presented customers with problems and dealers without solutions.
Amid the unfolding scenario of disappointment, Ford pressed dealerships to pre-order large quantities of Edsels in anticipation of a crush of demand. When the demand failed to materialize, retreating, and finally turning into outright rout, dealers rebelled, and the entire system, along with Ford’s business model, seized up like an Edsel leaking dry of oil.
The lesson: In today’s hyper-change environment, wide-angle, continual strategic transformation of your business model is not optional, but mandatory to marketing and innovation success.
Lesson Five: Remember—Context Is Everything
As with so many failures of marketing and innovation, the Edsel was launched without proper regard for context. Two adages apply:
1. Timing is everything.
2. You can do the right thing at the wrong time, and it will be the wrong thing.
In a failure to understand the context into which they were selling, Ford made the mistake of moving heaven and earth to maintain consumer secrecy in conducting its market research. This was the same error The Coca-Cola Company made in designing and executing research for “New Coke” in the mid-1980s. Both Ford and Coke focused on what was for them “today,” but it was, more accurately, “yesterday.” In both cases, Ford and Coke failed to imagine, anticipate, and market test the consumer world of “tomorrow,” the context into which they will be selling. They failed to undertake pre-search.
And it was even worse. The companies not only failed to look ahead to anticipate where their markets were heading, but both Ford and Coke failed in all their market research to test, analyze, and understand fully the larger context of how their product was to be positioned in its marketplace. Their obsession with secrecy meant they did not want to risk revealing and testing with consumers in market research the fundamental and complete offering that was Edsel, or the idea that New Coke will completely replace Coke Classic. In quest of secrecy, executives denied their company the real-world consumer insights that are the very reason for market testing. Secrecy superseded context.
Coca-Cola focused its research mainly on the “Pepsi vs. Coke” dimension of blind taste tests. And executives discovered the sweeter New Coke began faring better against its Coke archrival Pepsi than did Coke Classic. But, by omitting the key fact that New Coke will take away Coke Classic from its loyal drinkers, the company robbed itself of any meaningful measurement of consumer preference within this larger, crucial context.
Some thirty years earlier, Ford made the same mistake with its Edsel research. Like Coke, Ford was obsessed with secrecy, and so the company’s endless market research never presented the entire Edsel package to respondents. The look, feel, brand, name, technical
