Ford Lowers its Mercury Level to Zero -- and About Time, Too
The wonder about the Ford (F) decision to drop Mercury is, what took them so long?
I can remember writing "Whither Mercury?" stories since at least the mid-1990s. One story that stands out was about Ford starting a program to get Lincoln-Mercury dealers to invest in new lookalike dealership facilities, with Ford sharing the cost of design work.
At the time, the dealership program was seized upon as evidence that contrary to rumor, Ford wasn't going to drop Mercury, after all. Well, finally they are.
Today, with Ford already dropping Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo, it's a miracle Mercury lasted as long as it did.
Meanwhile, General Motors likewise recently dropped Hummer, Saturn, Saab and Pontiac, not to mention killing Oldsmobile earlier. Chrysler also killed Plymouth. With all those brands falling by the wayside, Mercury must have been checking the automotive obituaries first thing every day to see if it was listed.
The positive spin for Ford -- which makes a lot of sense, actually -- is that it's beefing up the Lincoln brand as a quote-unquote "true" luxury brand. The Mercury brand made it harder to achieve that differentiation. For what seems like forever, Mercury has been peddling rebadged and fancied-up Fords, priced somewhere in between the Ford brand and the Lincoln brand.
My own mental image of a Mercury is one driven for decades by a favorite aunt who bought it presumably to reward herself after years of hard work as a nurse, starting with the U.S. Navy in World War II. If anybody deserved a reward, she did, but to her, anything that smacked of showing off was out of the question. The Mercury was a step up from an ordinary Ford, but relatively affordable and not ostentatious - just right, in other words.
The thing is, fewer and fewer people as the years went by found Mercury to be just right. In a story I did a couple of years ago, citing data from J.D. Power and Associates, three Mercury models -- the Mercury Montego, the Mercury Sable and the Mercury Grand Marquis -- accounted for three out of the Top 10 models with the oldest buyers.
Ford will end production of Mercury vehicles in the fourth quarter of this year. Not only are Mercury sales declining, Ford admitted that most of its current Mercury sales are to fleet buyers and customers purchasing through employee, retiree, and friends-and-family corporate discounts.
Bottom line: Mercury has a U.S. market share of less than 1 percent. All Ford brands combined have a 16 percent share. In other words, except for sentimental reasons, Ford will scarcely miss it.
Photo: Ford