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Old 03-09-2013, 01:04 PM   #1
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Default Did motoring journalists fail Ford?

Motoring journalists failed in their analysis of Ford's FG Falcon. More critical reviews could have alerted the company sooner to the reasons why its flagship car was failing the marketplace, writes Julian Edgar.

Did journalists have a role in the demise of the Ford FG Falcon and Ford's manufacturing business in Australia?

(For those not following, the car has sold so poorly in Australia that Ford has decided to cease manufacturing cars here.)

But what if, when the FG Falcon was released, there had been widespread media analysis that argued the FG was the wrong car for the times and would not sell well.

Would Ford have made changes to the car more rapidly? Would the company have seen its miscalculation and shuffled resources so they could be better spent on improving sales?

These are important questions given that the Falcon is the only car Ford makes in Australia. It needed to be extremely successful in order for the company to make a business case for manufacturing cars in this country.

Car companies pore over media reports to assess how a new model is being received. If Ford believed the FG to be a great car, as apparently it did, then those beliefs are almost certain to have been confirmed by the prevailing media messages.

On the other hand, in the past there have been cars that were released to widespread criticism in the motoring media. In those cases manufacturers have tended to react very quickly by making changes to address concerns.

In addition, if the media coverage had more widely criticised the car, the Australian government would have been more alert to the fact it was putting money - lots of money - into a process that was unlikely to succeed.

Political pressure would have grown far earlier to urge Ford to invest in changes and developments that would be more likely to succeed in the Australian marketplace (so not, for example, spending our money on putting the turbo engine into the Territory).

There would have been a broader political and economic focus on the decisions being made about Ford's product line. I believe, in that situation Ford would have moved swiftly to make changes.

To put this another way, the largely uncritical acceptance by the motoring media of the FG Falcon played a part in the demise of Ford manufacturing in Australia.

So why did no writer I found in a detailed search of the Australian motoring media say that the FG Falcon was a stupid move for Ford to take?

The overwhelming message was that this was a wonderful advance.
I think that there are three main reasons.

The first is that the journalists appeared to make their assessments in far too small a frame of reference.

They made comparisons of the car to (a) the previous model of the Ford Falcon, and (b) the traditional opposition car, the Holden Commodore.

Let's take each in turn.

Making a comparison to the previous model worked when many people upgraded their existing Falcon with a new model. The buyer who had always owned Falcons was excited and interested to know if the steering was assessed as being better than the previous model, or the handling or the interior gadgets were better than the previous model.

But of course, no-one else cared less about that because their frame of reference wasn't the previous model.

The same applied to the comparison with the Commodore. If people were choosing only between those two cars, knowing which was better made sense. But if people were looking at neither the Falcon nor the Commodore, again it was an irrelevant comparison.

In this case, because the Falcon and Commodore had seen sales fall to a staggering degree over ten years, journalists should have been making comparisons to cars that were growing in popularity.

What, actually, did the Falcon offer a buyer compared with, say, a Mazda 3?

The second major reason that the media's acclaim of the FG was so misplaced was that journalists were responding to the car, not to what the car had to achieve for Ford.

There is no dilemma here: it's quite possible to say that the FG Falcon was a good car in X, Y and Z characteristics – but these were not the characteristics that the public was looking for, so the car's direction was misplaced.

There are easy media avenues to achieve this – a straight up and down road test of the car on its merits, and an opinion piece that used the expertise and understanding of the motoring journalist to suggest that the Falcon was going to sell badly.

So why did journalists overwhelmingly ignore that approach?

Here it's hard not to be cynical. They wanted to retain easy access to Ford press cars, to Ford PR – to the gravy train.

Their editors told them that they could write no such thing because the publication would lose advertising dollars.

Were they so close to Ford that they didn't want to offend their mates who work in the company? You pick.

The third reason for the lack of critical analysis is that journalists didn't think on a broad, societal level.

By the time the FG Falcon was released, Falcon sales had been on a strong downward trend for years.

Why was this occurring? There are many reasons.

At the time, the Toyota Prius had been released for nearly a decade – a car that changed the direction of virtually every car manufacturer in the world. The Prius had a lasting and ongoing impact on people's psyche regarding car efficiency and engineering.

Long distance travel within Australia, once the province of the car, was (and is) almost universally now done via cheap air flights. People have greater wealth and recreation time, so they want their cars to perform multiple purposes on different days – carrying five people one day, but the next day lugging home goods from the hardware store.

There has been a change in what is regarded as being acceptable driving behaviour on roads – driving fast has become socially disparaged.

Within this societal context, the FG Falcon with its lack of seating flexibility, poor fuel economy, and emphasis on performance, handling and travelling long distances, was out of step with the times.

But these thoughts would occur only if you looked at what the times actually were. Motoring journalists overwhelmingly failed to do that.

Link here http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4720488.html

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