Ford’s Lincoln Business Continues To Fail

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
Ford’s Lincoln Business Continues To Fail

© coutesty of Lincoln Motor Co.

Mercedes Benz sold 141,356 SUVs, and crossovers during the first half of this year. Ford’s Lincoln division sold 42,893. The gulf has persisted, more or less the same, for decades. Lincoln will never close the gap. It raises the question of why Ford supports a luxury line at all.

The core of Lincoln’s problem is that the brand has little respect among luxury buyers. Mercedes, on the other hand, shows up on more than one top 100 brands global-brands lists based on brand value.

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Most of these brand values are based on sales. Internationally, Lincoln is no match for Mercedes at all.

Ford has starved Lincoln, which is understandable based on its sales and the billions of dollars of investments it has made and will make into the electric-vehicle market.

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That leaves brand building for Lincoln unaffordable.

Lincoln’s product lineup is remarkably small, which makes its sales challenge extremely difficult. Lincoln has no cars at all. It relies entirely on SUV and crossover products. And, among these, it only has four models.

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Lincoln’s future is behind it.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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