With U.S. market share at an all-time low and the company's own CEO publicly criticizing his marketing organization, Ford Motor Co. on Thursday announced the retirement of North American sales and marketing chief Cisco Codina.
The Detroit News first reported that Codina was on the hot seat in April after the company missed its first quarter sales targets. Since then, Ford's decade-long decline in domestic market share has slowed, but still shrank to its lowest ever in August — just 14.4 percent, compared with 22 percent five years ago.
The newer “Ford Challenge” ads are doing better than the “Bold Moves” campaign they replaced, but as CEO Alan Mulally said last month, the automaker is still having a hard time convincing consumers to even test drive its cars and trucks.
Codina was popular with dealers, and many said Thursday that they believe he is a scapegoat for problems and policies for which he was only partly responsible. Inside Ford, he got credit for holding the line on incentives and introducing a more rational pricing strategy, but there was also a growing sense that someone had to pay for the failures in the organization.
“He was sacrificed,” said Randy Fuller, who just sold his Ford store in Lakeside, Ariz., but remains moderator of one of the largest online Ford dealer groups. “There have been rumors and rumblings for more than 90 days because he hasn't been hitting his targets. But it's not because of Cisco.”
Codina acknowledged every executive position in Detroit today is “a pressure cooker,” but he told The News Thursday that the decision to step down was his. He said he promised his wife he would retire after 30 years, a milestone he reached this spring.
“While it's tough to leave the company at a challenging time, I feel like our team has made a lot of progress,” Codina said, adding that dealer profits are up for the first time in years and inventories are finally getting under control.
Three months ago, Fuller began organizing a letter-writing campaign among dealers aimed at urging Ford to keep Codina.
“He understands the dealers and the dealers really, really respect him,” Fuller said. Other dealers echoed that sentiment.
“The issues are more structural than one person,” said Chris Lemley, a Boston-area dealer. “There is still a lot of internal conflict, for instance, between sales and marketing.”
He would like Ford to put someone in Codina's position with the power to end that, someone with the mandate to drive real change in the organization.
Until a replacement is found, Ford Americas President Mark Fields will oversee North American marketing, sales and service.
Together, Codina and Fields helped put together the “Bold Moves” marketing campaign.
Launched in April of 2006, “Bold Moves” was designed to change the way people thought about Ford. Instead of focusing on products and features, the campaign used edgy ads to promote a new brand image.
Dealers rebelled against “Bold Moves,” arguing that the often subtle messages were lost on consumers and did little to promote Ford's new products. Earlier this year, Ford shifted to a new, in-your-face product-based campaign that challenges consumers to compare its products with competitors' offerings.
“We're not getting rid of the Bold Moves campaign at all, but we're focusing on other messages right now,” Fields told The News this week. “It's taken a backseat to other messages, but that doesn't mean it's going away or that it's been killed.”
Sources familiar with the situation say the problem with the “Bold Moves” campaign was that it was not backed up by bold actions.
When the idea was first presented to Ford executives, Ford's marketing agency proposed 75 different bold moves to get consumers' attention and make the new tagline more than just talk. These included offering a 100,000 mile warranty, a 30-day money-back guarantee or carbon offset cards for all purchasers of new Fords.
Those people say all of these were nixed on the grounds that they would prove too costly.
Instead, Ford signed American Idol Kelly Clarkson to record a new anthem for the company and produced an online documentary about the changes taking place in Dearborn.
“You can have the best marketing team money can buy, but if the product doesn't live up to the marketing and consumers' own experiences doesn't justify that marketing message, it will not succeed,” said Jesse Toprak, executive director of industry analysis for Edmunds. “It's all about product.”
In other changes Thursday, John Parker, group vice president , was named executive vice president of Ford — Asia Pacific and Africa. Michael Bannister, chairman and CEO of Ford Motor Credit Co., was elected an executive vice president of Ford.
