The Wonderful World of Marketing — Season 1, Episode 6: “The Mustang Shift”

In this episode I talk about the tremendous customer-centric Copernican Shift that the Ford Motor Company made in order to successfully design and market the Mustang — the most successful car in history with 50 years of continuous production and 1MM vehicles manufactured in year 1 of production. Today, the Mustang is the most parted car available — you can make a ’64 to ’69 Mustang completely out of reproduction parts. The Mustang Shift This shift was a big turnaround for Ford, who had recently lost $250MM on the Edsel — a car designed with engineering principles first, not consumer needs. I had a chance to see a restored Edsel the other day, and it’s a very nice car, but terribly timed from a marketing standpoint.

Written by

Former CMO at Microsoft U.S. and Sprinklr; currently CMO at PROS, and recently described by Tom Foremski at ZDNet as "...a near perfect example of what a tech company CMO should be like." Personal Philosophy: “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson