Ford Executive Vice President Mark Fields today took questions from journalists at the company’s Centennial T Party regarding the future of Ford and its products. We’ve put together some highlights from the Q&A session.
Q: How are you working to change perceptions at Ford ?
A: We are working on vehicles for the marketplace that continue to represent great value, great technology, and more smart features. That’s the way to change perceptions.
We have changed our marketing approach. We’ve launched our “drive one†campaign and it’s really built on four pillars: Quality, Safety, Smart, and Sync and we are really focusing our campaign.
Q: Is your market approach becoming more segmented as opposed to mass market?
A: It’s a culmination of utilizing new media, like the Internet, direct marketing, event marketing, those type of things to really get the message out to where the people are.
Q: What do you expect on Thursday?
A: Well, we are announcing our earnings on Thursday, so expect to hear about our earnings. We are going to talk about how we are accelerating our transformation.
Q: How is July shaping up?
A: July is continuing the trend we are seeing in terms of the market being slower than last year. We are continuing to see the segment shifts. As you know the month isn’t over till the last day of the month, but clearly, we are continuing to see a weakness in the marketplace.
Q: How about this Thursday? (When second quarter earnings are reported)
A: We’ve made a lot of progress as a company over the last couple of years, in a lot of different areas: quality, cost structure, products introduced into the marketplace and we will have more on Thursday. I’m not going to get into any more of it but we will clearly talk about our plans going forward.
Q: Any more European products in the works?
A: We’ll talk more on Thursday.
Q: Why is Mercury a brand worth saving?
A: Mercury attracts a very different customer for us that may not be attracted to the Ford brand, and from that standpoint, we have a large owner base of Mercury buyers and it’s an important part of our lineup.
Q: You haven’t made any of your financial targets this decade. Given that track record, on Thursday, when you tell them of your plans, what will you tell them you’ve accomplished?
A: I think we tell them what we have told folks over the last couple of years: We have met or exceeded our plans that we have laid out in terms of our financial target. We will talk more on Thursday about where we are heading, but we’ve met a lot of our goals that we set out to about two-and-a-half years ago, around quality, and our cost structure.
We are on target for our $5 billion of operating cost reductions, we have met our commitment about products introduced into the marketplace, we are on target for our 70 percent refreshing of products by the end of this year and 100 percent by 2010, so we’ve hit a lot of those targets. We’ll talk more on Thursday and give you a little more flavor of how we’ve ended up in the second quarter.
[Mr. Fields also said to expect an annual volume of 500,000 Ecoboost engines in North America over the next four years and about 750,000 globally.]
Compiled by Mark Elias.
