Sell them the car, the truck, the motorhome, the field tractor, everything. If it had an engine, wheels, and a solid customer base, Ford made it. Marketing genius.
I also don’t know much about Mustangs, as I’ve always been more partial to the Camaro. What I do know is over the years, Ford has made some pretty solid decisions. Don’t get me wrong, there are enough bad decisions to fill a set of encyclopedias, but let’s focus on the good ones this time.
First off is the big Model T price drop. When Ford started making the Model T, each and every unit was hand-crafted, much like every other car company at the time. Cars were expensive to produce due to the wages required for the lengthy process. When Ford brought in the assembly line, they could produce more cars in less time with better quality control. With savings like that, it only made sense to pass some of it on to the consumer to sell more cars. How much did the price drop over the years? A new Model T in 1923 was about one-third of the price from a little over a decade earlier. No longer was personal transportation a luxury for the rich. But instead, anyone could own a car. What’s better is being able to sell them their first car. If you can get them into a Ford once, as long as you play your cards right, you can get them into a Ford again and again. Half a century later, they hadn’t forgotten that. If the customer loved their Mustang, there’s a chance that they might want to mow their lawn with a Ford, too.
“The Ford LGT responds to your touch like a Mustang”. All they meant by that was it started, stopped, drove forwards, drove backwards, and turned, but still, what a marketing strategy!
I’ve gotta say, I definitely like the style. Two-tone paint, bold decals, twin headlights, chrome hubcaps, and a fat front I-Beam axle reminiscent of cars from the past. Much like the Mustang, an electric start was standard, but it made slightly less horsepower, with customer choice of eight, ten, or twelve horsepower models. Live up north where the grass is only a problem for half the year? No worries, the Ford LGT has optional attachments to handle snow, and everything, no matter how obscure. As they say, there are forty-seven different attachments available. The unit pictured is the big twelve-horsepower monster, yet the Mustang doesn’t appear to be a GT. It must have been a marketing gimmick to make the tractor look even that much tougher. Either that or I know even less than I thought about Mustangs, and it is, in fact, a GT.
Have a question or comment for Kelly? Post it at lmtimes.ca/kirk
