Ford plans truck promotion to prevent sales falloff

Ford Motor Co. is planning a promotion for its F-150 and Super Duty trucks later this month to boost demand and build on a 13 percent rise in sales of the full-size pickup line in August.

The automaker wants to keep up momentum on the F-Series pickups, Doug Scott, Ford's director of truck marketing, said in an interview. The F-Series according to company figures was a top-10 seller in the U.S. government's "cash-for-clunkers" program and Ford hopes to prevent a sharp drop-off in sales now that the program has ended, Scott said.

The F-Series has gained 12 points of market share since its redesign last year and the model now controls 36 percent of the full-sized pickup segment, Scott said. The F-Series is Ford's top-selling model and has been the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. for the past 32 years. The truck line has provided much of the Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker's profits in good years.

"The F-Series is the cornerstone of what Ford is all about," Wes Brown, a Los Angeles-based auto analyst with consultant Iceology, said today in an interview. "It's a huge part of Ford's income and revenue."

The F-Series was the only full-size pickup truck to increase sales in August industrywide, Scott said. He said Ford's incentives on the F-Series are $2,000 to $3,000 per vehicle below what Chrysler Group LLC offers on its Dodge Ram pickup and about $1,000 to $1,500 lower than incentives pitched by General Motors Co. for its Chevrolet Silverado.

'Truck Month'

The August sales promotion will be dubbed "Truck Month" and Ford hasn't yet ironed out details of when it will start or what kind of incentives will be offered, Scott said.

"We did well in 'cash for clunkers,'" Scott said. "The F- 150 ranked high in both trade-ins and vehicles sold under the clunkers program."

The F-Series doesn't appear on the government's top-10 list of best-selling vehicles in the clunkers program because it counts each variant of a model, such as a two-wheel-drive version and a four-wheel-drive version, as an entirely seperate vehicle, Scott said. Auto researcher Edmunds.com of Santa Monica, California, ranks the F-150 as the fourth best-selling model in the clunkers program when all versions of the model are counted as one.

The F-Series' importance to Ford has grown as sales and profits of its sport utility vehicles have declined, said auto analyst John Wolkonowicz of IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts.

"They are even more dependent on the F-series for global profits," Wolkonowicz said in an interview. "It's the crown jewel of the company. Nothing else even comes close."