Dan Neil: Edsel Agonistes

Edsel was a first name before it was ever a car name. But it was never a very popular thing to call a child: according to the Social Security Administration-- which has time for this sort of thing--the name Edsel has ranked only as high as 400th on the top 1,000 names for boys, and that was in 1927. More popular names that year included the soaring Kermit, Buford and Elvin.

After Sept. 4, 1957--"E-day," the day 50 years ago when Ford Motor Co. unveiled its taco-faced disaster, the Edsel--the name dropped off the list altogether, never to return. A quick check of demographic records suggests that a convention of Americans first-named Edsel could be held in a hotel linen closet.

Of course, you never hear anyone say,"This is our son Hindenburg," either.

The Edsel was one of the cruelest tributes ever paid a man. Named after Henry Ford's son and the longtime company president--who died at age 49 in 1943--the Edsel was not just a car but a whole division within Ford, created to compete head-to-head with General Motors' Oldsmobile. It was a sales disaster. Two years later, future Ford president Robert McNamara persuaded the board to pull the plug on the Edsel. That's the same McNamara who became President Johnson's Secretary of Defense and refused to recommend withdrawing from Vietnam, even though he knew a lemon when he saw one.

The Edsel fiasco has been autopsied many times--it is the stuff of books and business-school case studies--and yet I can't help reaching for the rib spreader one more time. Here was an early and definitive illustration of message revenge, the kind of fierce consumer blowback that can occur in markets when a product or service (or military occupation) fails to live up to its hype. Consumers, it turns out, regard their passive absorption of mass advertising as an investment of psychic space; to the extent that they allow themselves to become aroused with anticipation, they consider their credulity as something like a down payment.

The Edsel had been frantically ballyhooed for months ahead of its arrival with a new kind of highly scientific marketing, an alchemical blend of psychology, mass media and old-fashioned hucksterism. Call it the iEdsel. By the time the silk was pulled off the Edsel in hundreds of showrooms around the country, people were panting to see their automotive deliverance, the plutonium-powered, pancake-making supercar they'd been promised. What they saw was a large, relatively expensive, curiously styled Mercury--curious insofar as the vertical grille looked like a midwife's view of labor and delivery. And they were not happy....