Been There Done That. Last time I encountered a car company in as bad a shape as Mitsubishi it was spelled F.O.R.D.

Through two world wars, Ford Motor Company grew into a multinational monolith with far-flung interests around the globe. But if ever the excesses and faulty value judgments associated with mass-market thinking in the fifties, sixties, and seventies were to be assigned a prototype, Detroit's "Big Three" auto manufacturers--Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors--would be it.

During the three decades following World War II, each of them made marketing decisions based on what the other two were doing, instead of staying in touch with the changing wants and needs of their customers.

And while they were busy watching each other, foreign competition was charting the growing dissatisfaction in the marketplace.

For 20 years, Datsun had been watching with greedy interest the increasing disenchantment of the American consumer for the Big Three's "planned obsolescence" practices. During that time, Japanese engineers had come to the United States, photographed our country roads and city streets; moved in with American families disguised as exchange students; recorded our habits and practices; and reported to Japan in mind-numbing detail all they had learned.

Within a few years, this wealth of market research and the implementation of statistical quality control procedures as defined by Dr. W. Edwards Deming, paid off: The imports began to roll onto American soil. Soon, imports outnumbered domestic automobiles in six western states; and in the Northeast, Audi, Volvo, BMW, and Mercedes began to make inroads against American auto manufacturers.

Still, it took the failure and subsequent bailout of Chrysler before senior management in Detroit began to stand up and take notice. But by this time, domestic manufacturers were faced with car-lots full of unsold inventory, and many dealer organizations had begun to hedge their bets by branching into foreign car distribution agreements. By the 1980s, the Big Three were losing millions of dollars in sales every day, and Wall Street was more than a little alarmed.

The Ford Motor Company was not going to roll over and play dead. When this crisis erupted, I was a creative executive at Wells, Rich, Green, the corporate advertising agency for the Ford Motor Company, whose task it was to convey Ford's image to its many publics.

Initially, the failures of the domestic automotive industry led us to believe that the public we had to address was one very close to home: Ford's major stockholders. This was a logical conclusion, because, at the time, Ford was losing $1 million a day, and investors were, obviously, becoming increasingly alarmed by what they were hearing on the 6:00 o'clock news.

To stay connected with any market, no matter how selective, it sometimes helps to think of the people who make up that market as a single, composite individual. To help us remember that any target market is not a mass of faceless entities, but a group of individuals, at Wells, we sometimes used the device of a "composite character"; essentially, this practice "put a face" on our consumer.

At Ford, many of its major shareholders were middle-aged and older women, whom we profiled as often widowed or divorced, usually white, often suburban, and more than likely living on a fixed income. We assigned "her" the moniker "Mrs. Wilson".

We quickly realized, however, that more important than the demographics on "Mrs. Wilson" was the fact that, typically, she was someone who either relied on or was influenced by the opinions of others; specifically, in the case of Ford stock, she was being influenced by her broker, her fund manager, or other financial advisors. Thus we realized that to reach "Mrs. Wilson", we first had to communicate with her advisors; hence, "Mrs. Wilson" became our secondary selected market, and her advisors became our primary selected market.

It's wise to remember that to reach a specific market, it may sometimes be necessary to go through their advisors, or "key influencers," who then become the primary market. Unfortunately, for the Wells' team, this made our job more difficult, because our primary target audience was considerable more "hype-proof" than that represented by the "Mrs. Wilson" paradigm.

These were the people whom "Mrs. Wilson" would eventually call when she was trying to decide whether to hold or fold her position in Ford securities. They were the ones with the most to lose if her investment in Ford proved to be imprudent. W

While Wells was busy getting a fix on the target audience and figuring out how to best approach them, Ford was not idle; it was making a determined effort to become an international automotive brand. Ford engineers had designed the Escort, the first "world car" to come out of the Big Three, which encompassed so-called European styling and quality control in the international marketplace. That effort, along with a "zero defects" manufacturing initiative were the silver lining in the storm clouds raining down Ford's seven-digit daily losses.

In 1983, the Ford Escort became the best-selling car in Europe, and received the Car of the Year award, ironically, in Japan.

Riding on that success, the following year, Ford introduced its "European concept" car, the Taurus to the American public. In addition to all that was new and exciting, business for several of Ford's other divisions--Ford Aerospace, Ford Trucks, and Ford Tractors--was booming, but as far as the investment community was concerned, Ford spelled automotive, and automotive stocks were dogs that would not hunt. At Wells, we were expected to change that perception "overnight."

Under the direction of vice presidents Jim Lawrence and Paul Margolis, the Wells, Rich, Green account and creative teams attacked this seemingly impossible task. The first step was to identify the various levels of our selected market's infrastructure.

The Ford Motor Company was like a nation unto itself; the shear scope of its worldwide operations was daunting. The Wells team began the laborious task of drilling down and labeling each and every level of contact that impacted a single decision by private and institutional investors to buy or sell Ford stock. Our mission was to create a corporate advertising program geared to influence each of those levels. We had to make Wall Street see Ford's titanic losses as something other than an approaching iceberg.

Knowing the difference between market opinion and market knowledge can mean the difference between the success and failure of a company. Part one of this objective was to find the right phrase that would say it all, that we could use in our promotional materials; we had to make it clear that Ford's future was bright, that rumors of its demise were exaggerated.

Margolis dug into Ford's past to find its promise for the future, and it was a line credited to Henry Ford himself: There's a Ford in America's Future. The next step was to make sure Wall Street knew that Ford was more than just its consumer automotive division, that:•one of every three trucks on the road was a Ford; • that Ford tractors were the best-selling in the world; • that the majority of satellites that circle the globe were put their by Ford Aerospace. To do that, Wells placed double-page spreads in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, as well as Time and Newsweek. We left no stone unturned.

While the media blitz was doing its job reeducating Wall Street about Ford's ongoing divisional successes, the automotive giant's Special Vehicle Operations Group was poised and ready to take investors' breath away with the rebirth of the "muscle car," in the form of the high-performance SVO Mustang, which had been designed to compete in the sports car arena, and whose sales were being captured and held by the foreign makes--Porsches, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and the like.

Wells was assigned the task of promoting the Mustang, but it was a balancing act, for we had been directed to stress performance, not "muscle."

A selected market sometimes can be further divided into even more select "submarkets." Fortunately, the SVO Mustang was given a head start when the California Highway Patrol (CHP) came looking for the car that would enable its officers to keep up with and catch the new menace on the freeways of southern California: the very high-performance sports cars that were the Mustang's competitors. As soon as the CHP chose Ford's SVO Mustang, we lost no time in taking advantage of the situation.

After stalling a few times, my creative team hit one out of the part with: This Ford Chases Porsches for a Living Not only had we scripted a memorable tag-line, we had found another excellent selected market segment to tap: law enforcement publications. Within a few months, 22 agencies added fleets of SVO Mustangs to their pursuit rosters.

Most important, though, was that government institutional investors were encouraged to hold their funds' positions--totalling millions of shares--in Ford. Through awareness campaigns directed at both a generic (the Wall Street crowd) and a specific (government agency investors) select market, Ford's stock began to go up and eventually split 4:1. This left "Mrs. Wilson" very, very happy indeed.

Two very important selective marketing lessons were revealed in the Ford campaigns: 1.) Look beyond the obvious when identifying a select market. 2.) You may have to divide your audience into primary and secondary segments.

In the case of Ford, if we had directed our campaigns at "Mrs. Wilson" and not at those people who influenced and advised her, we would have failed in our efforts to reestablish Ford as a company in which it was safe to invest.

Stay on the alert throughout any select marketing campaign for the opportunity to extend the reach to include other circumstantial select consumers. Select marketing techniques are not synonymous with targeted marketing techniques. In the Ford campaigns, because we jumped on the opportunity presented by another select market--the California Highway Patrol--we were able to simultaneously present the new image of Ford's automotive division and convince investors of the viability of Ford stock.

Ford's issue was one of rebuilding confidence, market by market. Twenty years later, Mitsubishi is faced with the same challenge. The more things change, the more they remain the same