Plus, IMO, most of the Ford models are better looking than the Lincoln equivalent.

Dearborn— A top Ford Motor Co. executive says the automaker’s struggling Lincoln brand is “not true luxury,” and faces a tough road back that will take years.

J Mays, Ford’s design chief, said the company’s focus on rebuilding Lincoln has only just begun — and that Lincoln’s reinvention could take a decade.

“No, we’re not true luxury,” Mays said Tuesday following an event at the automaker’s Dearborn campus. “We’re in an investment stage with Lincoln. We’ve probably got a 10-year investment to make.”

Luxury brand transformations can take many decades, as it did for General Motors’ Cadillac. Mays’ proclamation that Lincoln is “not true luxury” is evidence Lincoln still lacks definition.

“It’s definitely a wanna-be luxury brand,” said Michelle Krebs, senior analyst at automotive research firm Edmunds.com, who likened Lincoln to other struggling luxury brands such as Infiniti and Acura. “It’s not there, though, by any stretch.”

Jim Hall, analyst at 2953 Analytics LLP, another research company, said in a telephone interview that he agrees: Lincoln does not represent true luxury. But Hall also said Lincoln — which he believes needs at least three decades to return to its glory days of the late 1980s and early 1990s — is competing against other not-quite luxury brands.

“Most luxury brands today aren’t luxury brands,” Hall said. “They’ve become luxury-branded products. Many are thinking of luxury as a series of checklists, but the traditional definition of luxury has a degree of exclusivity.”

Now that automakers offer luxurious features such as leather seats in most mass-market models, Hall said the branding of the current crop of luxury vehicles is more comparable to selling smartphones than to the high-end cars of the past.

“There’s nothing you can do to a smartphone to make it luxurious except glitz it up,” Hall said.

“But that’s styling and branding, not luxury.”

Need 'unique selling point'

The problem with most luxury vehicles today, Hall said, is that most offer similar features that don’t differentiate themselves from the competition.

Mays agrees, and said Lincoln has a “whole list of things” it will implement in future cars.

“Every brand needs to have a DNA and a unique selling point and things in the vehicle that make you think, ‘That’s that particular brand,’” he said.

Mays declined to provide specifics, but said Lincoln will build on the new midsize MKZ’s improved interior design and unique push-button shift.

Hall cited a significant yet inexpensive quirk in Bentleys — a push-and-pull, accordion-style dashboard air vent that gives consumers a one-of-a-kind experience.

“It’s not a big thing. But the physical action feels astonishingly substantial,” he said. “Every time you use it, it’s not like anything else.”

Reinvention hampered

By many analyst accounts, Lincoln’s reinvention — which started with the launch of the new MKZ sedan this year and will include three new vehicles in coming years — has been hampered primarily by delays in manufacturing and product development.

The new MKZ has sold well since arriving at dealerships, though sales through the end of July are still down slightly compared to last year. Lincoln sales overall are down 7.6 percent; the brand had targeted double-digit sales gains before the year started.

Through new television ads, Lincoln is targeting younger, affluent buyers. Lincoln also has made sales inroads in nontraditional areas, including California and Texas.

Executives in Dearborn are prepping Lincoln for its debut in China next year, which could provide the biggest boost to the brand in decades.

But a rapidly changing global automotive industry could make Lincoln’s transformation difficult, if not impossible, in the long term.

“A product every year isn’t very much and once they go through the first MKZ, four or five years later, they have to have another one,” Krebs said.



From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/2...#ixzz2dJFqucjA