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beige_alertI was reading something in Wikipedia and, you know how this goes, clicked on something, and then something else, and, eventually, ended up in the Ford Merkur article. If you don't recall, "Merkur, the German word for Mercury, was an automobile brand which was briefly marketed by Ford Motor Company in the United States and Canada from 1985 to 1989."
I was in high school then, and had no interest in lower-end luxury cars, but I remember Merkur. They must have run a lot of advertising. Worse than remembering "Merkur," which is an actual name, I find the model "XR4Ti" vaguely familiar. It looks like something you get when a cat walks on your keyboard, but after all these years I still remember it. They must have really run a lot of advertising.
Thinking about it, although XR4Ti looks a bit like something the cat typed in, or like they let the engineers come up with a model designation, it's probably not. The cat would actually produce something like "oe.y5p" and the engineers something like "B34g.2" No, they had marketing experts work on it. That's why I can remember it (vaguely) after twenty years of never having cared in the first place. They had focus groups and testing. They probably determined that XR4Ti was 17% more memorable than XS4Ti, and that 20% of people thought XR4Ti sounded like a luxury car they want whereas 19% of people thought XR3Ti was a "droid" that "wasn't the one they were looking for."
I was in high school then, and had no interest in lower-end luxury cars, but I remember Merkur. They must have run a lot of advertising. Worse than remembering "Merkur," which is an actual name, I find the model "XR4Ti" vaguely familiar. It looks like something you get when a cat walks on your keyboard, but after all these years I still remember it. They must have really run a lot of advertising.
Thinking about it, although XR4Ti looks a bit like something the cat typed in, or like they let the engineers come up with a model designation, it's probably not. The cat would actually produce something like "oe.y5p" and the engineers something like "B34g.2" No, they had marketing experts work on it. That's why I can remember it (vaguely) after twenty years of never having cared in the first place. They had focus groups and testing. They probably determined that XR4Ti was 17% more memorable than XS4Ti, and that 20% of people thought XR4Ti sounded like a luxury car they want whereas 19% of people thought XR3Ti was a "droid" that "wasn't the one they were looking for."
