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“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” Day agreed, and he quickly developed his own set of slides tracking purchase consideration, press coverage, and social media impact.

Day had been at Ford since 1989, and he had spent much of the past two decades thinking about what he would do if he were in charge of communications. Now that he was, Day ordered a sweeping reorganization of Ford’s public relations team and told everyone that their top priorities would now be building and defending the company’s reputation. The best way to do that, he said, was by “aggressively communicating” Mulally’s plan and Ford’s progress against it. Reporters were soon inundated with a relentless barrage of press releases, product briefings, and media dinners. Some journalists complained it was too much, but Day’s strategy made Ford impossible to ignore.

Mulally had Day report to Farley initially and told the two men to
work together so that communications could support the new marketing strategy then under development. Farley hoped to unveil that strategy at the New York auto show in April 2008, but it was proving far more difficult than he imagined. Farley assumed his biggest challenge would be changing the way the American people thought about the company. Now his early research was revealing that, at least on the coasts, they did not think about Ford at all. From a marketing perspective, that was far, far worse.

One group that did care a great deal about Ford was its dealers. So Farley started with them. As a group, they had decidedly mixed feelings about the company. On one hand, most of them loved Alan Mulally and believed that he would deliver on his promise of better products in the not-too-distant future. On the other, most of them felt like it had been a long time since they had gotten a straight answer about anything from Dearborn. That was particularly true when it came to two issues near and dear to them: dealer consolidation and Mercury.

Though Ford could only claim 14.8 percent of the U.S. market, it still had roughly the same number of dealerships in the United States as it had when that figure had been closer to 25 percent. In big cities, that meant too many dealers were competing for a smaller slice of a shrinking pie. Many of them, like Ford itself, had been dying a slow death for years. They could no longer afford to keep up their stores, and it was hurting Ford’s image in the marketplace. General Motors and Chrysler were struggling with the same problem, and all three companies had launched nationwide campaigns to consolidate their dealer networks—particularly in major metropolitan areas. The idea was to reduce the total number of stores in a given area so that those that remained could do more business. In theory, this was an entirely voluntary process, with the automakers acting as matchmakers between franchisees who wanted to sell and those who wanted to buy out their competition. But as the head of Ford’s National Dealer Council, Tom Addis, was fond of saying, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” So Ford had resorted to arm-twisting.

Mercury was another sore point for dealers. The brand was the
brainchild of Edsel Ford, who in 1938 recognized that the company needed a mid-market marque to bridge the gap between its luxury Lincolns and mainstream Fords. General Motors had already developed a comprehensive brand strategy with a different marque for every socioeconomic class that could afford an automobile, and Ford was losing customers to its crosstown rival as a result. Henry Ford, who still thought the world only needed one automobile, was reluctant to expand his lineup. But Edsel won a rare victory and persuaded his father to create Mercury. For decades Mercury did exactly what Edsel hoped it would. It brought in new customers who wanted something more than a Ford but less than a Lincoln. But by the 1990s, as the American market became crowded with foreign brands, it became increasingly difficult to find a niche for Mercury. The brand’s annual sales peaked in 1993 at 483,845 vehicles. By 2007 that figure had fallen to less than 169,000.

When Mark Fields returned to the United States at the end of 2005, he considered killing off Mercury. However, two new products—the Mercury Mariner and Milan—were about to arrive in showrooms, and he figured Ford needed to recoup its investment in them before pulling the plug. Dealers learned that Fields was taking a hard look at Mercury, and they wanted to know what Ford planned to do with the brand. The question was more than academic for those who owned stand-alone Lincoln Mercury franchises.
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Most of those stores sold more Mercurys than Lincolns, and the dealers who owned them worried they would not be able to stay in business without the added volume that Mercury brought. Fields knew that, if his plan to do away with Mercury got out, sales would collapse. So he decided to string the dealers along until Ford was ready to summon the undertaker. Many of them suspected as much, and they were not happy. When Mulally arrived and started talking about focusing on the Ford brand, their fears were magnified. And while the new CEO was all about openness
and honesty, he also knew that the details of his brand elimination strategy needed to remain secret.

Farley embarked on a tour of the country, scheduling meetings with dealers groups in each region. He could offer no more clarity on Mercury and told them the consolidation effort would continue until Ford had right-sized its retail sales network, but Farley did ask for their input in developing his new marketing strategy. He also told the dealer groups that, since they knew best what sold in their part of the country, they would now have a say in how Ford’s marketing dollars were spent in their region. Nobody at Ford had ever done that before. Both moves went a long way toward restoring dealer confidence. They also had an almost immediate impact on Ford’s sales. Dealers in California, for example, decided the company should focus on its new crossover, the Ford Edge. Ford put up billboard ads across the Golden State and offered more generous incentives on the vehicle there than it did in other regions. By February 2008, California—long a bastion of Toyota and Honda—had become one of the fastest-growing markets in the country for Ford.

Farley really did want the dealers’ input as he hammered out his new advertising campaign. He recruited a group of sixty from around the country and flew them to Dearborn to review the creative work and tell him what they thought of it. But he also knew from his experience at Toyota that, when dealers felt like they had a say in an automaker’s marketing strategy, they were more likely to support it with their own advertising dollars. And they did, to the tune of approximately $800 million.

At Toyota, Farley had all the marketing money he wanted. At cash-strapped Ford, he would have to do a lot more with a lot less. He decided to rely on the same guerrilla marketing tactics he had used to launch Scion. Early on, he and Day agreed that what they referred to as “earned media” would be the key to getting the most bang for Ford’s buck. The idea was to spend more on public relations and less on traditional advertising—to get other people to tell Ford’s story for it. They assigned members of Day’s communications team to work with Ford’s dealers, for example, and used money earmarked for
incentives to hire outside agencies to help Day put together a social media offensive. Soon, at Ford press conferences, old-school newspaper and magazine reporters in coats and ties found themselves seated next to unkempt bloggers and twenty-somethings with websites.

A
s Farley pieced together his new marketing strategy, there were more changes at the top of the house in Dearborn. Mulally decided that, just like communications and product development, Ford’s factories should also be managed centrally. He was pleased with Joe Hinrichs’ role in negotiating the transformational agreement with the UAW and, in December, promoted him to the newly created post of vice president in charge of global manufacturing.

A few months later Vice President of Human Resources Joe Laymon announced that he was leaving Ford. Once the UAW deal was concluded, he had walked into Mulally’s office and said his work in Dearborn was finished. Oil giant Chevron Corporation had made Laymon an offer, and he told Mulally he was going to take it. Mulally did not try to change his mind. Like Holleran’s, Laymon’s skills had been more in demand in the old Ford. Mulally did not need a hatchet man. Laymon was replaced by his second in command, Felicia Fields, a methodical African American woman who was more adept at putting together employee handbooks than Machiavellian plots.
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One of the biggest human resources challenges now facing the automaker was how to improve morale and keep workers focused on their jobs in the middle of the most painful downsizing in Ford’s history. Since Mulally had arrived in September 2006, more than 35,000 jobs had been eliminated in North America alone—mostly in the United States. That was on top of the thousands of positions that had been cut in the months before he was hired. In Ford’s factories, most of the downsizing had simply gotten rid of excess manufacturing capacity. Mulally’s drive to consolidate the company’s global operations meant fewer people were needed in other areas as well. But in many parts of the business, the employees who remained were
being asked to do a lot more. And they were being asked to do it better than ever.

At the same time, Mulally was struggling to extend his cultural revolution deeper into the organization. By the end of 2007, Ford’s top executives had embraced his new order. However, lower-level employees reported that the old ways persisted further down inside the bowels of the corporation. Mulally wanted to make sure that everyone understood the aims of his revolution and their role in it. He decided to spell it out for them—not in a little red book, but on a small blue card.

Wallet cards had long been a favorite tool of Ford’s human resources department, and Felicia Fields was already working on a new one when Mulally was hired. It took Fields and her team the better part of the following year to finish it. When Mulally saw the final result, he was unimpressed. It sounded like a bunch of generic corporate-speak to him. It was hardly revolutionary. What he wanted was a pocket manifesto.

“Does everybody really like this?” he asked when she presented it to him. As Fields soon learned, that was code for “I don’t like this one bit.”

She and Mulally began work on a new version that would more accurately reflect the key tenets of his philosophy. Fields knew they had it right when every word on the card sounded like it was coming out of Mulally’s mouth. In fact, much of what was on it was lifted directly from his early notes.

On the front of the card, beneath Ford’s Blue Oval, was the phrase that, to him, summed it all up—“One Ford”—and three other Mulally catchphrases: “One Team,” “One Plan,” and “One Goal.”
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Beneath the first, Mulally spelled out his vision for the company:

Under “One Plan,” he restated his now famous four-point strategy. Beneath “One Goal,” he wrote:

The back of the card listed what Mulally called “Expected Behaviors”:

When the first batch came back from the printer, Mulally was thrilled. It was all there, everything he wanted Ford employees to know and understand. He started passing them out to his executive team at the company’s global leadership meeting in January 2008. Soon each employee had one—and was expected to carry it at all times.

“Take two of these and call me in the morning,” Mulally would say with a laugh as he passed them out. “This is the cure for what ails you.”

J
im Farley had concluded that far more potent medicine was required to put Ford back on consumers’ radar screens. The man tasked with helping him formulate it was Toby Barlow, chief creative officer at Team Detroit, a marketing collective that united the five WPP units—JWT, Mindshare, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Wunderman, and Y&R—that handled Ford’s advertising in North America. Barlow was a Chinese puzzle, a mild-mannered practicing Quaker who wrote werewolf novels and did pro bono work on behalf of Detroit in his spare time. He was also an advertising genius, the man responsible for the original Saturn ads that had launched the initially successful GM brand back in 1990. Barlow now brought that same genius to the Ford account, coining a new tagline for the company that sounded like a Mulally quote: “Drive One.” It beat out about
fifty other candidates that included such cringe-worthy mottos as “Do the Henry.”