How good are Alan Mulally, Jim Farley and Mark Fields? They pretty much brought Ford Motor back from abyss to one of the most respected brands on the road. Can they do the same for Lincoln?

Now that Mercury will be hitting the graveyard later this year, all eyes will be on Ford’s leadership to reviving a storied but recently lost brand in Lincoln. It’s going to get tougher to charge premiums for near luxury vehicles in this market with Ford, Chevy and Nissan delivering what most would have only expected from expensive brands just a few short years ago. Sometimes you have to take a few steps back before you can move forward and Ford/Lincoln will start writing a new chapter in their history after Mercury becomes a part of it!

From AutoNews.com:

DETROIT — Ford Motor Co. must do with Lincoln what it has done with the Ford brand — infuse it with new energy and sparkling product — if it is to offset the loss of Mercury sales when that 71-year-old brand dies.

Though Lincoln has a freshened lineup and stronger styling than in the past, it is still an also-ran among luxury brands in the United States. Ford clearly will need more volume from Lincoln to appease Mercury dealers — especially those who currently have Lincoln-Mercury stores.

“We have to make a very compelling case to our dealers very quickly,” says Mark Fields, Ford’s president of the Americas, in an interview.

Read the full article here.

Notice how Ford actually connects with customers with their new marketing campaigns? Well we know Alan Mulally gets a ton of credit but Jim Farkey is the true architect behind this new found smarts in advertising at Ford. In this piece Farley talks about how the recession made Ford and other companies rethink all of their marketing and the opportunities it created in digital.

If Farley keeps performing at this level he will be one of the names thrown around to replace Mulally when the time comes or he’ll get scooped up and nabbed by another automaker for CEO.

From AutoNews.com:

NEW YORK — Ford marketing boss Jim Farley says the economic downturn in recent years created new opportunities for digital marketing.

“Everything has to work in this economy,” Farley said here Wednesday at Advertising Age’s Digital Conference. “If the economy hadn’t dropped the way it did, we would have been on auto pilot and not experimented the way we did. Our production quality online is better than our broadcast.”

Advertising Age is an affiliate of Automotive News. That experimentation is led by what Farley calls the democratization of marketing.

Read the entire article here.

The automotive landscape has been changing so rapidly it’s sometimes hard to keep up. GM and Chrysler had to be saved by the federal government, while Ford was able to avoid that fate. Their troubles have probably helped Ford, but Ford has also been on a tear with impressive new models like the Ford Fusion, and many more new models are in the pipeline.

Auto analysts expected Ford to show some improvement, but the announced numbers were a pleasant surprise for many.

Ford Motor Co. posted a surprise profit of $2.3 billion for the second quarter — a sharp contrast to the whopping $8.7 billion loss it reported for the same period a year ago — but the profit was largely due to one-time gains related to its debt reduction moves.

Even with those special items removed, the Dearborn automaker surprised Wall Street with a pre-tax operating loss of $424 million for the second quarter of 2009, excluding special items — a $609 million improvement compared with the second quarter of 2008.

After taxes and excluding special items, Ford posted an operating loss of $638 million in the second quarter, or 21 cents per share, compared with a loss of $1.4 billion, 63 cents per share a year ago. That also was a marked improvement over the $1.4 billion loss — $1.8 billion after taxes and excluding special items — that Ford reported for the first three months of the year, when it lost 75 cents per share.

Wall Street had been anticipating a loss of 52 cents per share, after taxes and excluding special items, according to a survey of a dozen analysts by Thomson Reuters prior to today’s announcement.

“While the business environment remained extremely challenging around the world, we made significant progress on our transformation plan,” said CEO Alan Mulally. “Our underlying business is growing progressively stronger as we introduce great new products that customers want and value, while continuing to aggressively restructure our business and strengthen our balance sheet.”

It looks like Alan Mulally’s turnaround efforts are on track.