Ford Seeks New Image for Mercury
Waving aside persistent rumors of its demise, Ford Motor Co.’s Mercury division unveiled five new models Thursday, including an all-new muscle car and spruced-up versions of two other vehicles.
“Mercury is here to stay,” Mark Hutchins, president of Irvine-based Lincoln Mercury, repeated three times while presenting the cars at the Chicago Auto Show. “We have no plans to kill Mercury. Why should we kill something that makes us a lot of money?”
The Chicago presentations of the all-new Mercury Marauder and two variants each of the Cougar and Grand Marquis were orchestrated not so much to boost the brand’s revenue--at least $6.5 billion last year--as to try to prove that the reports of Mercury’s imminent death are greatly exaggerated.
Mercury, long criticized for being just rebadged Fords with a little glitz and leather, has seen sales slide steadily from its peak of 528,000 in 1985 to 359,000 last year. Sales last year alone plummeted 18%--from 2.6% to 2.1% of the U.S. market--worse even than General Motors Corp.’s doomed Oldsmobile division, which was given the ax in December.
Now Mercury is trying to fend off that fate by introducing the Marauder, a burly eight-cylinder four-door with a 4.6-liter engine and more than 300 horsepower that recalls the muscle cars of the 1960s.
The Marauder, which will go on sale in the summer of 2002, will lead an effort to beckon younger buyers to a division whose direction has become muddled in recent decades.
“They’ve got a lot of murky vehicles--the Villager [minivan] is not very popular, and the Sable is mostly going to fleets,” said Jim Hossack, a senior analyst with AutoPacific, an auto consultant firm in Tustin. The Tracer and Mystique, Mercury’s versions of Ford’s Escort and Contour, have been discontinued, and the Cougar has been weak.
“Mercury needs a lot of help. They’re stodgy at best,” Hossack said. “But if Ford tries hard enough, it can give Mercury life. I think the Marauder is absolutely the right thing for them to do. Time and time again a brand has been resuscitated by adding horsepower.”
Mercury was born in 1938 as Ford’s semi-luxury division, and has been marked by stylish design, as in the 1950s’ Monterey, and with attitude, as in the 1949 Mercury Coupe that James Dean drove in “Rebel Without a Cause.”
But recent years have not been as glorious. “If it’s not win-win-win for us, our dealers or our customers, it’s not a good proposition,” Hutchins acknowledged. “There’s always been a losing proposition: We weren’t making much money, or customers weren’t happy.”
The upcoming Mercury lineup, including an all-new 2002 Mountaineer sport-utility vehicle due any week now, and a replacement for the Villager minivan in a couple of years, should turn around Merc’s fortunes, he said.
The Marauder, a repeat of a name used by Mercury in the 1960s, is based on the 235-horsepower Grand Marquis but is completely black with tinted headlamps and taillights, giving it a brooding, slightly menacing look.
“It’s fast, it’s black and it’s cool,” said Ben Gibert, Mercury’s 38-year-old director of product development. “This vehicle is menacing as it comes down the road.”
Gibert said he hopes the Marauder, of which only about 10,000 will be produced each year, will lure buyers in the 45-to-55-year-old range.
Industry experts aren’t so sure.
“I think it’s going to be tough for the Marauder to catch hold,” said Dan Gorrell, vice president and auto industry specialist at the marketing firm Strategic Vision in Santa Ana. “It’s not going to be a mainstay; it’s going to be for 60-plus buyers who want to relive their youth. The brand doesn’t have the ability to reach down in age.
“I think it would be very difficult to change how it’s perceived: as a weaker sister of the Ford division.”
In fact, the average age of the Grand Marquis buyer is somewhere in the 60s, while for the Cougar it’s in the 30s.
But the Cougar has had sluggish sales, with unit sales in 2000 down 29% from 1999.
Mercury on Thursday also unveiled two sporty derivatives of the Cougar: the Zn (from the symbol for zinc), which comes in only bright yellow with a hood scoop, rear spoiler, 17-inch aluminum wheels and yellow stitching on the black seats, and the C2, which has a blue instrument panel and new exterior colors with color-coordinated rear spoiler.
“I’m not sure this is going to help Cougar,” said Hossack of AutoPacific. “It’s in a segment that’s small and declining. It’s a bit peculiar-looking. That will be a tough vehicle to resuscitate.”
New versions of the flagship Grand Marquis are the LSE with a stiffer suspension, sporty 16-inch wheels and leather-wrapped steering wheel and floor shifter, and the Limited, which features leather-wrapped steering wheel, light-colored parchment leather seats and other minor enhancements.
Mercury dealer John Porcelli thinks Mercury’s doing just the right thing with the Marauder and the appearance packages for the Cougar and Grand Marquis.
“I think they will get some youth into the brand, kids and grandchildren of our Lincoln customers,” said Porcelli, president of Capital Lincoln Mercury in nearby Chicago Heights.
He thinks the Marauder, with its bucket seats, floor-mounted shifter, fog lamps and 18-inch forged aluminum alloy wheels will draw 40- and 50-year-olds who might have bought a Chevrolet Impala SS--no longer made--or an Oldsmobile, which is destined to disappear like DeSoto, Studebaker and Plymouth.
“We have to separate ourselves from Ford,” Porcelli said.
