Ford's naming headache

Nice line in yesterday’s Guardian Weekend magazine by motoring writer Sam Wollaston, who gives a thumb’s down to Ford’s Kuga. ‘What next? The Kapree? The Ford Korteena? I preferred it in the olden days when Ford just named their cars after bad magazines for chaps: Escort, Fiesta … so why couldn’t they just carry on? Ford Penthouse, Ford Asian Babes…’ (he obviously knows his way round the top shelf.) And later ‘Anyway it’s a 4×4 (Ford Big Ones?)’

Of course, Ford isn’t unique – Range Rover Vogue – but it does seem to have made a habit of it (Ford Escort Cosmopolitan). It ran into problems with the Focus though in Germany in 1998. There, Focus is one of the biggest weeklies and a court ruled that the carmaker could not use the name. In the end, Ford paid DM1m (then about £330,000) to a charity chosen by Burda and agreed to work within marketing guidelines set by the publisher.

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