There have been a couple of reference questions from students looking
\nfor the origin of and information about an old Ford ad that used the
\nmotto: “Ford, That’s Incredible!” Thanks to Renee for finding out the
\nfollowing information:<\/p>\n
This piece of text is from a webpage at
\nhttp:\/\/www.ciadvertising.org\/SA\/sprong_03\/382J\/jenn\/innovative%20mind.html.
\nIt refers to Mary Wells Lawrence of WRG (Wells, Rich, Greene, Inc.).<\/p>\n
Mary created another miracle for Ford. The company was suffering due to
\nhigh gas prices-people were buying small, foreign cars. The impact of
\nthis was written all over Ford’s corporate office. When Mary visited to
\nmeet with the executives, she noticed that the lights were not fully
\nturned on; the workers were depressed. She instructed her research team
\nto find out what people thought about buying a Ford, and found that the
\ncompany was still in the mind’s of consumers, they just needed to be
\nreminded. Mary suggested the tagline “Ford, That’s Incredible!” and a
\nwriter created an anthem based on it. The song invited consumers to
\nvisit Ford plants, to see what the mechanics were up to. It landed WRG
\nthe account, and people came in droves to the Ford factories to see
\nwhat they were up to (Lawrence 219). In later ads, WRG used real
\nmechanics working on cars with the tagline “Quality is Job One.” This
\nfixed the workers lack luster for their job, as each believed the
\ntagline that followed images of Ford workers (Lawrence 226).<\/p>\n
There is a whole section on Ford’s “Quality Is Job One” campaign on
\npages 577-580 of ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MAJOR MARKETING CAMPAIGNS (Ref
\nHF5837.E53 2000), but we didn’t make the connection last night because
\nthe jingle\/ tag line, “Ford, That’s Incredible” doesn’t seem to be
\nspecifically mentioned in that article. Interesting, Ford fired
\nLee Iacoccad he took Ford’s ad agency K&E (Kenyon &
\nEckhart)away with him to Chrysler, WRG, who wasn’t under consideration,
\nflew in cold and made a last minute pitch to Henry Ford and walked away
\nwith the $12 million Ford account (“Wells, Rich, Greene, Inc.” in THE
\nADVERTISINF AGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ADVERTISING, vol. 3, pp. 1647-1650, Ref
\nHF 5803. A38 2003 v. 3). You can find that the jingle was
\ncomposed by Steve Karman in 1979. The WRG agency is most famous
\nfor their Alka-Seltzer ads such as “No Matter What Shape” and “I Can’t
\nBelieve I Ate the Whole Thing”. There’s a good chabnce that there
\nis more info in some of the books on advertisinfg and marketing in our
\nstacks, especially the one from the 80’s like CASES IN ADVERTISING AND
\nPROMATION MANAGEMENT HF5823.C37 1987, EMPERORS OF ADLAND HF 6182.O6 M56
\n1958, THE WANT MAKERS HF5821.C557 1989, or you might try HENRY AND
\nEDSEL: THE CREATION OF THE FORD EMPIRE F655 2003.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[197],"tags":[6860],"class_list":["post-1390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","tag-reference"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/dawgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/dawgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/dawgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/dawgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/dawgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/dawgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/dawgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/dawgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/dawgblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}