Ford Motor Company: Look, some of my best friends are Negroes (sic)

In a last-ditch attempt to try to repair its battered brand image, Ford Motor Company is trying to appeal to what it calls "niche customers" -- ethnic and minority Americans:

The latest marketing campaign by Ford offers seats to a Beyonce Knowles concert in Mexico and sponsors a Web site where the R&B superstar belts love songs in Spanish. The face staring out from Ford print ads is Korean heartthrob Ahn Jae Wook, with the sales pitch written in Chinese.

Ford has also enlisted R&B singer Kelis and hip-hop car guru and deejay Funkmaster Flex to hype its new small sport-utility vehicle, the Edge. The company is putting up graffiti murals in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and New York. It has sponsored a whole evening's worth of shows on the CW television network, a cable channel that attracts a large African American audience.

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Ford will sponsor a sweepstakes on Spanish-language Univision.com where the winner will see Knowles perform live at a concert in Monterrey, Mexico, in July.

Ford's marketers also think they've got a strong shot with Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese customers and younger people who don't feel the built-up antipathy toward American brands. The ads featuring Wook, a wildly popular soap opera star and musician, are running in major Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese newspapers and magazines around the country.

Ford is using remixes of Wook's music in commercials for the Edge that will play on Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese cable stations that cater to those groups, mainly on the West Coast. Ford is also putting new music from Wook up on a company Web site.

Ford has a lot of mainstream marketing for the Edge, too. Leading up to New Year's Eve, it is sponsoring the 585-square-foot super-sign billboard in New York's Times Square -- the largest curved electronic billboard in the world. Still, the campaign is one of the company's largest efforts to target African American and Asian American customers

With the Edge, Ford is trying to break into a stronghold of Japan automakers, the market for lightweight, fuel-efficient sport-utility vehicles, called crossovers. The crossover market has grown from 7.2 percent of the U.S. market to 10.6 percent in 2006, according to Edmunds.com. Next year, the crossover segment is expected to grow to 12 percent.

The segment, ruled by Toyota Highlander and RAV4 and Honda Pilot and CR-V, is highly competitive. Mazda recently introduced the CX-9, and a smaller model, the CX-7, is due next year. Audi has the Q7 crossover, its first SUV. The Edge is priced from $25,000 to $30,000, in line with the RAV4 and CR-V.

The segment, once ignored by Detroit, is getting tougher. "These are products designed from the ground up to compete against the import crossovers," said Jesse Toprak, director of industry analysis at Edmunds. "That's why we see such strong marketing efforts behind the Edge."

Ford has a lot riding on the Edge as it tries to wean itself from large SUV profits. The automaker has leveraged virtually everything it owns, from car factories to the car logos, to borrow enough money to rebuild the company. Ford also wants to change the company's image as a proliferator of gas-guzzling SUVs.

Where does one even begin on this? First of all, the idea that Ford is going to revive itself by assuming that Black and Asian Americans are stupid enough to fall for targeted marketing pitches for crappy vehicles is one of the most insulting things I've seen coming out of a corporate America that never slouches in the insulting department. Second of all, whom does Ford have to blame for its problems but itself?

I remember the gas lines of the 1970's, and the pathetic, too-little, too-late attempts of American carmakers to produce fuel-efficient vehicles. The Chevrolet Nova. The Ford Pinto. And of course Chrysler's brilliant decision to shitcan the nearly immortally reliable Dodge Dart/Plymouth Valiant line with the joke-on-wheels that was the Dodge Aspen/Plymouth Reliant tinbox. But did Detroit learn a lesson? Hardly. Instead, during the 1990s, it took advantage of American prosperity to return to its gas-guzzling roots, and now has no one but itself to blame.

The notion of planned obsolescence has been around since the 1950's, but Detroit never seems to have learned that unless Americans are feeling flush enough that they can trade in their cars every three years, reliability is an issue. You can drape Beyoncé Knowles over the hood of a Ford Edge all you want to, but if a buyer knows that he can get ten relatively trouble-free years out of a Toyota Highlander, which do YOU think the buyer's going to pick?