David Wallace (executive)

David Wallace (October 6, 1908 – October 6, 1974 in Taormina, Sicily), was hired in 1955 by Ford Motor Company as manager of product planning and merchandising its protégé car debuting in 1957. At the end the name chosen was Edsel.

Given the responsibility of researching potential names and being frustrated by conventional research, Wallace secured the aid of poetess Marianne Moore who did not disappoint with such suggestions as Mongoose Civique, Resilient Bullet, Andante con Moto and Utopian Turtletop among others. The entire correspondence was later reproduced in New Yorker Magazine in the April 13, 1957 issue. It was up to Wallace to inform Miss Moore of Ford’s final choice.

Wallace later wrote of his experiences with Ford Motor Co. in Automotive Quarterly, "Something went wrong. History had never witnessed anything like it before. More money was spent in its launching than any other previous product offered upon the consumer market anywhere – a quarter of a billion dollars. It was to be the most perfectly conceived automobile the world had ever seen – every part of its planning guided by public opinion polls, motivational research, Science. It did not work out that way…"

Career

• Time Magazine, Manager of Promotion Research, 1939-49.
• Ford International, Manager of Foreign Marketing Research, 1949-1951
• Crossley Inc., Vice President 1952-53
• Ogilvy, Benson & Mather, Inc., Advertising Agency, Mgr. of Market Research, 1954-55.
• The Ford Motor Co. (Edsel Division), manager of marketing research of product planning and merchandising of the Special Products Division, 1955-1958
• President of the American Association of Public Opinion Research, 1958-1959
• In 1962 Wallace earned his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University and returned to the world of academia.

Publications

• First Tuesday: A study of Rationality in Voting, (Doubleday, 1964), a statistical study of the voting habits of the citizens of Westport, CT.
• American Journal of Sociology, LXIX, (September 1963), “A Tribute to the Second Sigma” (presidential address to Amer. Assoc. for Public Opinion Research, Public Opinion Quarterly, Fall 1959, p 311-325
• Letters From and To the Ford Motor Company, Marianne Moore, David Wallace, The Pierpont Morgan Library, 1958
• Automobile Quarterly, 1975, Vol. XIII, No. 2, “Naming the Edsel”, p. 182-191

References

• The New Yorker, April 13, 1957, pp 130–136
• Ford, The Men and the Machine, Robert Lacey, Ballantine Books, NY, p 504-511
• Time Magazine, April 22, 1957, Vol. LXIX, No 16k, p 96
• Madison Avenue USA, Martin Mayer, Pocket Books, Inc. 1958 (orig. published by Harper & Brothers), p 109, 111-113, 118, 122, 184
• Peter Carlson - Washington Post Staff Writer. "The Flop Heard Round the World; That Name. That Grille. Ford Had High Expectations, but When the Edsel Debuted in 1957, It Became America's Most-Hyped Failure." The Washington Post. 2007. HighBeam Research. (September 5, 2014). http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-7579996.html