Welcome to Corporate America! Where everything is branded and brand loyalty is bred into your every fiber. Don’t like it? Then why don’t you sit down and have a soda (Coke or Pepsi?) as you check out this latest bit of branding bull.
The Ford Motor Company, apparently not content with appealing to older men and making me drool over their various models, has decided to appeal to a younger, more XX-chromosome-inclined demographic: namely little girls — in particular, those between the ages of eight and 16.
You’re probably having a serious case of “WTF” right now, but I assure you that Ford — or rather The Beanstalk Group, their licensing agency — has a plan. The plan involves luring little girls into loving Ford and all its products through the use of accessories, jewelry, cosmetics, and back-to-school trinkets emblazoned with pink and the silhouette of a galloping horse. The new product line shall be dubbed “Pony Girl” and Barbie shall weep.
Also included in the mix are other stereotypically girly icons like butterflies, stars, and flowers because apparently, Beanstalk has never heard of Lisa Frank. Remember Lisa Frank? Creator of those rainbow-saturated folders, backpacks, and decals that portrayed overly cutesy animals with gigantic eyeballs?
Lisa Frank was clearly on drugs. Awesome, rainbow-colored drugs.
This is what I imagine Pony Girl looking like, only with more horseys (horsies?). Man, I cannot believe I just wrote that word. Let’s pretend that never happened. So far though, the only example we have of what’s to come is the following:
The color scheme, according to the article**, was carefully chosen after consultation with the similarly aged daughters of John Nens, the director of global brand licensing for Ford. Wow! And they chose pink? Holy hot hell, Nens, your girls are clearly out-of-the-box thinkers. It’s like they created a whole new breed of pink-loving girls. And in case you’re wondering what the motivation for all this is, check out the following quote:
“[Licensing is] a way for young girls to get a piece of a Mustang before they’re old enough to obtain a driver’s license,” asserts Rachel Terrace, the leader of the soon-to-be-named Pink Pony Girl Cult. I assume they drink strawberry milk at meetings, making them kind of awesome and making me kind of want to go.
Nens, the devil incarnate, further explains. “This is really about the essence of the brand. And then, when they turn 18 or 20 years old, hopefully they’ll want to buy our car.”
Or hopefully, when they turn 18 or 20 years old, they’ll be so blinded with Ford-lust that they’ll be easily impressed by over-the-hill Nens rolling up in his Mustang and promising them candy and ponies. Nens clearly thinks ahead and with his…er, head – well, at least one of them anyway.
This pink-possessed product line will start desecrating your local stores in late 2009/early 2010. It will also boast taglines like: “Let Loose,” (So Nens wants your daughters to be loose?) “Untamed Heart,” (that’s just lame) and “A Pony is Forever” – which is a damned lie, Ford, and you know it.
*As usual, I come across as overly bitter in this post. I was never a fan of pink as a kid, instead choosing to wear Hulk Hogan-licensed t-shirts, but I love pink now. I just think this is a ridiculous idea in general and that Nens desperately wants to get into your daughters’ pants and wallets.
**The original article, in case you care: http://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/packaged-goods/e3ie9cf6d4fe9496d0528d99f5b86aba029
