Oh, Ford!

I’ve read a few articles about Ford’s new progressive-ish marketing initiative, wherein, they encourage potential customers to test-drive Fords, and they also encourage their past and present employees to “talk about the cars.”

At first I thought this was pretty cool, considering that Ford is the historical paragon of supplier-side snobbery. (Any color you want, as long as it’s black, and all that.) Is the very same company now engaging in a sort of ‘conversational marketing’ campaign?

Eh…not really. Check out the related site. They’re not allowing user comments. When they say “talk about the cars,” they don’t really mean “have an open-ended conversation about the cars, and say whatever you want.” What they mean is, “There are some people out there who aren’t drinking the kool-aid. Make them drink the fucking kool-aid.”

This is a good place to quote from Linked, which I’m almost finished reading:

A typical example [of overblown organizational rigidity] comes from Ford’s car factories, one of the first manufacturing plants to fully implement the hierarchical organization. The problem was that they got too good at it. Ford’s assembly lines became so tightly integrated and optimized that even small modifications in automobile design required shutting down factories for weeks or months. Optimization leads to what some call Byzantine monoliths, organizations so overorganized that they are completely inflexible, unable to respond to changes in the business environment.

This campaign could be just another example. Someone high up at Ford said “Let’s do that social networking thing I keep hearing about,” but they weren’t able to really do it and still hold true to the founding principles of old Henry.