Ford Motor Company may have made it through the Great Recession in the best shape of all U.S. automakers, but that does not mean incoming CEO Mark Fields steps into a clean slate. On April 21, 2014, Ford officially announced the planned retirement of Alan Mulally and Fields's ascension to the CEO role effective July 1. Mulally, brought in from Boeing in 2006, is credited with moving Ford through the recession without the Chapter 11 reorganization that General Motors and Chrysler took. The departure is being framed inside Dearborn as a victory lap. Outside Dearborn, the story is more complicated.
Despite the strong standing, Ford as a brand has three communications problems waiting for the new CEO. The first ninety days of the Fields tenure will define which of the three he engages on and which he kicks down the road.
1. The Lincoln Brand
GM came out of bankruptcy swinging, and few of its brands have fared better than Cadillac. Ford, by contrast, has seen its luxury brand flounder. The PR problem is simple: no one can tell you the difference between the models. MKX. MKZ. MKT. MKS. MKC. The nomenclature is incoherent, the positioning is diffuse, and the buyer cannot picture the vehicle before walking the lot. The 2014 MKC compact crossover launch was supposed to be the brand's reset moment. It has been a credible product. It has not been a brand reset.
Branding is vital in every industry. In automotive — where consumers research the segment before they research the dealer — it is the entire game. Cadillac is selling on the ATS and the CTS. Lincoln is selling on a nameplate system its own dealers cannot keep straight in conversation. Fields inherits the problem. The fix is a product-and-naming problem first, a communications problem second. Both are solvable. Neither is solvable in ninety days.
2. The China Market
Ford has largely failed to capitalize on the fastest-growing automotive market in the world. China is, as of 2013, the largest single auto market on the planet by volume — more than 21 million vehicles sold last year. Ford's share lags GM, Volkswagen, Toyota, and the rest of the Japanese majors. The Changan Ford joint venture is producing volume, but the brand has not built the consumer pull-through that the German and Japanese competitors have spent two decades cultivating.
The company needs a widespread public-relations and product campaign to establish a foothold — and it needs to do it immediately. The window during which a foreign automaker can build a durable position in China is closing as the domestic Chinese OEMs scale up. Fields will be measured on China volume as the single cleanest external metric of his tenure. The communications work — Lincoln launching in China later this year, the expanded dealer footprint, the China-specific product investment — is in motion. Whether it produces the volume number the board needs is a separate question.
3. Internal Morale
Worker morale in the auto industry has been tenuous for years. Fields will need to preserve Mulally's celebrated "all-for-one" Thursday Business Plan Review discipline and extend it. Promoting Ford as a company brand for company people, rather than a federation of makes loyal to individual divisions, will lay the foundation for the next chapter of the One Ford architecture.
The internal communications challenge is the one most easily underestimated from the outside. Mulally's signature was not a strategic insight. It was a cultural reset — making it safe to surface bad data on the Thursday chart, making the CEO the audience for the operating discipline rather than the recipient of pre-cooked summaries. Fields has been Mulally's chief operating officer since December 2012. He has been inside the Thursday BPR. The question is whether he can keep running it the way Mulally ran it — or whether the discipline drifts back toward the pre-Mulally Ford the moment the architect leaves the room.
What Fields needs to do in the first ninety days
Name the Lincoln decision. Either commit to the MK-prefix system with a clearer positioning framework, or retire it for named nameplates. The worst outcome is another year of incoherence. Fields can buy himself runway by being decisive on the question, regardless of which direction he goes.
Set the China number. The board, the analysts, and the trade press will all be looking for a quantified target. Fields should give them one — a specific volume goal, a specific market-share goal, a specific date — and stake the tenure on it. The communications cost of a missed public target is real. The cost of refusing to set a public target is bigger.
Run the Thursday BPR personally. Mulally never delegated it. Fields should not delegate it. The cultural permission to show red on the chart depends on the CEO being the audience. Any signal that Fields is light-touching the BPR will be read inside Dearborn as a return to the pre-Mulally drift.
Get on camera early. Fields is less practiced as a public communicator than Mulally was. The fix is repetition. Earnings calls, dealer meetings, industry events, automotive press. The CEO who is invisible in the first ninety days cedes the narrative to the analysts and the trade columnists. Fields has the operating record. He needs the communications muscle to defend it.
Keep the Mulally narrative durable. The departing CEO's legacy is part of the new CEO's positioning. Fields benefits from the One Ford story being told well — and he will be the one telling it for the next several years. The handoff communications discipline of the next ninety days will be measured against the Jack Welch–to–Jeff Immelt transition at GE, the Bill Gates–to–Steve Ballmer transition at Microsoft, and the dozens of other industrial-era succession communications cases the field will reach for. Most of those transitions damaged the predecessor's legacy. The strongest ones did not.
The bottom line
Mark Fields is taking the Ford CEO seat with the strongest operating inheritance any new Detroit Three CEO has been handed in a generation. The communications inheritance is more mixed. Lincoln is not solved. China is not solved. The cultural discipline that produced the operating record is dependent on a leader who is leaving the room.
Every CEO transition is a communications event before it is anything else. The first ninety days are the diagnostic. What Fields communicates between now and the end of his first quarter as CEO will define the read every analyst, every reporter, and every Ford employee carries into the next three years.
The transition is the test. The test starts July 1.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
