Ford, That’s Incredible! – Reference Question
Comments Off on Ford, That’s Incredible! – Reference Question There have been a couple of reference questions from students looking
for the origin of and information about an old Ford ad that used the
motto: “Ford, That’s Incredible!” Thanks to Renee for finding out the
following information:
This piece of text is from a webpage at
http://www.ciadvertising.org/SA/sprong_03/382J/jenn/innovative%20mind.html.
It refers to Mary Wells Lawrence of WRG (Wells, Rich, Greene, Inc.).
Mary created another miracle for Ford. The company was suffering due to
high gas prices-people were buying small, foreign cars. The impact of
this was written all over Ford’s corporate office. When Mary visited to
meet with the executives, she noticed that the lights were not fully
turned on; the workers were depressed. She instructed her research team
to find out what people thought about buying a Ford, and found that the
company was still in the mind’s of consumers, they just needed to be
reminded. Mary suggested the tagline “Ford, That’s Incredible!” and a
writer created an anthem based on it. The song invited consumers to
visit Ford plants, to see what the mechanics were up to. It landed WRG
the account, and people came in droves to the Ford factories to see
what they were up to (Lawrence 219). In later ads, WRG used real
mechanics working on cars with the tagline “Quality is Job One.” This
fixed the workers lack luster for their job, as each believed the
tagline that followed images of Ford workers (Lawrence 226).
There is a whole section on Ford’s “Quality Is Job One” campaign on
pages 577-580 of ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MAJOR MARKETING CAMPAIGNS (Ref
HF5837.E53 2000), but we didn’t make the connection last night because
the jingle/ tag line, “Ford, That’s Incredible” doesn’t seem to be
specifically mentioned in that article. Interesting, Ford fired
Lee Iacoccad he took Ford’s ad agency K&E (Kenyon &
Eckhart)away with him to Chrysler, WRG, who wasn’t under consideration,
flew in cold and made a last minute pitch to Henry Ford and walked away
with the $12 million Ford account (“Wells, Rich, Greene, Inc.” in THE
ADVERTISINF AGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ADVERTISING, vol. 3, pp. 1647-1650, Ref
HF 5803. A38 2003 v. 3). You can find that the jingle was
composed by Steve Karman in 1979. The WRG agency is most famous
for their Alka-Seltzer ads such as “No Matter What Shape” and “I Can’t
Believe I Ate the Whole Thing”. There’s a good chabnce that there
is more info in some of the books on advertisinfg and marketing in our
stacks, especially the one from the 80’s like CASES IN ADVERTISING AND
PROMATION MANAGEMENT HF5823.C37 1987, EMPERORS OF ADLAND HF 6182.O6 M56
1958, THE WANT MAKERS HF5821.C557 1989, or you might try HENRY AND
EDSEL: THE CREATION OF THE FORD EMPIRE F655 2003.
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