Ford launches a quality ad campaign, but can it win back customers?

Ford Motor is determined to convince consumers it has turned the corner on quality and you can buy a Ford-made vehicle and rest assured it will be free of defects.

It's a herculean task, given the automaker's record number of recalls and quality woes over the past decade. But on June 25, Ford was ranked No. 1 among mainstream brands on the JD Power's Initial Quality Survey. That win is fueling an aggressive new ad campaign Ford will launch on July 4 during Major League Baseball games.

From there, you will see the messaging pretty much everywhere.

"The campaign is: We put quality first. Now Ford is first in quality," said Phil O'Connor, Ford's global head of marketing communications. "This ad will roll through every marketing tactic that we have. You'll see it at dealerships at point of purchase displays … and at all our consumer touchpoints."

O'Connor declined to say how much Ford is spending on the campaign, but said it is "a substantial" amount. He said the quality campaign will run through the end of the year and possibly into next year as Ford works this quality message into other ads such as its summer sales event that starts July 7 and Ford's end-of-year sales campaign, too.

Ford's quality issue is arguably the biggest challenge facing the automaker. It has dragged down both financial performance and brand image over the past decade, said Karl Brauer, executive analyst with iSeeCars.com, which recently authored a study analyzing vehicle recalls that showed in the past 12 months, Ford recalled 19.6 million vehicles, more vehicles than the rest of the auto industry combined.

Granted, recalls often impact older model vehicles. Whereas JD Power's Initial Quality Study measures the number of problems a new vehicle experiences during the first 90 days of ownership. A top score on JD Power's Initial Quality Study means the cars coming off the assembly line at Ford today are fairly free of flaws.

JD Power said its Initial Quality Study is historically a strong indicator of long-term dependability, noting that the top-scoring brands have had fewer mechanical and structural breakdowns later on.

Still, Brauer said it will be hard for a single marketing campaign to erase its recall history for those Ford vehicle owners impacted by problems, yet "it's a first step and one Ford should absolutely be promoting."

Erik Gordon, a business professor at University of Michigan, added, "It's the best news Ford can flog on quality, so it might as well use it. But if the (JD Power) rankings slip, Ford will regret calling attention to them."

Brags and banners everywhere

On June 30, just five days after Ford celebrated the news that it placed first among JD Power's Initial Quality ranking, a giant banner flanked the entire lower front portion of its new World Headquarters building on Oakwood Boulevard in Dearborn that read: "We put quality first. Now Ford is first in quality," with an image of the JD Power award on it.

Inside the building, too, banners hung on various walkways and corridors, were delivering the same message. It comes after Ford ran newspaper ads in various papers in cities where it has factories, including the Detroit Free Press, thanking employees for the work they've put in to help Ford achieve the milestone in quality improvement.

"When you're advertising with Ford there are many stakeholders," O'Connor said. "We want to thank our employees and reinforce to dealers we're on the right path and communicate to customers that we're on the right path."

The campaign came together in the past two weeks as soon as Ford learned it was No. 1 on the JD Power list, said Ford dealer Richard Bazzy, owner of Shults Ford, a prominent group of three Ford dealerships in the Pittsburgh region and with one Ford store in West Virginia.

Bazzy is on the Ford National Dealer Council and on the Marketing Dealer Advisory Board. He had input in the ad, a 30-second television spot, that Ford will air on July 4. Ford will also have digital ads and social media campaigns.

The 30-second TV spot starts with a narrator saying, "If you put your name on a vehicle, you're signing off on its quality. We don't take that lightly. We take an honest assessment of where we can be better. Quality takes thousands of Americans, far away from any spotlight." The narration continues over dramatic music with photos of vehicles on the assembly line and ending with: "Now Ford is No. 1 for initial quality among mainstream brands."

"Are we proud? Yes. Are we finished? Not even close. This is not the finish line," Bazzy told the Detroit Free Press. "It's really important though because you have people out there who … say, ‘I don't want to buy Ford again.' But we have such a loyal brand. So we want to make sure we show the people who love us that we have taken the quality issue to heart and they can still buy their favorite brand without worrying about the quality."

Ford dealers look for more sales

Brian Godfrey, dealer owner of Pat Millikin Ford in Redford Township, is also on Ford's Marketing Dealer Advisory Board and he chairs the advertising group for Southeast Michigan Ford dealers. He said it has been 16 years since Ford has topped JD Power in quality and that fact will matter to customers who have heard the negative messaging over that time.

Godfrey, who sells about 3,500 to 4,000 new cars a year at Pat Millikin Ford, says when quality improves, that, in turn, helps dealers sell the cars. It also frees up their service lanes to focus on maintenance work rather than warranty claims and recalls.

"We've been starting to see the impact of improved quality and Ford has been sharing some of their internal data with dealers, but until you see some sort of third-party validation, that's what matters to consumers," Godfrey said. "Dealers have invested in this brand and we're starting to see the difference ourselves in the number of warranty claims coming through. They are down."

In fact, Ford CEO Jim Farley promised Wall Street in a June 25 interview with Yahoo! Finance that Ford's warranty costs declined last year and will continue to drop this year noting that "recall costs are going down," and "this will be a big financial story for the company, too."

Bazzy admits the campaign may not fully eradicate the doubts of some consumers who had bad experiences, but he said, "We had a problem and we addressed it and this is a celebration of that. It's not balloons, but humble, and the result of people who put their reputation on the line. If you're concerned about quality, just buy Ford. We do take it to heart and we do put our name on it."

The return of 'the graybeards'

As the Detroit Free Press reported last summer, Ford leaders have been implementing various processes starting in 2023 to address the quality problem that is costing the company both financially and reputationally among some car buyers, as well as the safety risks any recall from any automaker poses.

The changes Ford made to its quality processes include:

• More rigorous procedures around new vehicle launches.
• Hiring 300 specialists to help with engineering and design.
• Tougher tests of vehicles, engines, components and transmissions to spot any weak links and fix them early.
• Changing its supply chain operations to ensure Ford receives higher quality parts.
• And, finally, benchmarking competitor Toyota's best manufacturing practices to implement the "lean manufacturing" process across Ford's plants to catch defects early and fix them before a vehicle leaves the factory.

Last week, during a virtual news briefing, Ford leaders said the company has in place an "industrial system team," which is a group of quality engineers who work across departments to audit, review and address quality issues before vehicles go to market. Previously, the Ford leaders said, when issues would appear, a blame game would ensue between the development team, engineers, plant workers and suppliers.

Ford also has brought back or hired 350 quality engineers to staff the team and work to ensure its cars and trucks are free of issues, instead of playing automotive Whac-a-Mole on issues after the vehicles leave the assembly line.

Most notably, Ford executives said more than once that artificial intelligence programs used to analyze vehicle quality weren't as effective as a set of highly trained eyes so the automaker rehired quality specialists - internally known as "graybeards" who mentor younger engineers - to spot and fix quality issues and develop the company's use of AI.

Ford's 'likely lost 'em forever'

Despite all the progress and an aggressive new ad campaign, auto industry experts say Ford faces a Sisyphean task in winning back many of the 19 million customers impacted in the past 12 months by recalls. Like the king in Greek mythology, Sisyphus, who forever faced a fruitless task that never yielded a meaningful result, so, too, is the plight of Ford in winning back angry customers.

Consider the frustrated comments on such sites as Ford Company Complaints page on Facebook to see how many have sworn off Ford vehicles for good.

Ivan Drury, director of Insights at Edmunds, told the Detroit Free Press that durability and quality are the "ultimate hook" to ensuring consumer loyalty and building that credible reputation takes years. But "getting labeled with an unreliable tag happens in a heartbeat, and digging yourself out of that hole is a brutal uphill climb."

He said marketing messages around quality attract first-time buyers and keep the loyalists happy if they avoided the lemons.

"But if that first purchase was a disaster, you've likely lost 'em forever," Drury said. "If they jumped ship from a bulletproof brand only to get burned, faith is gone, and they'll probably start side-eyeing both the brand of the vehicle in the repair shop and the company touting the claims of reliability."

Drury notes that there are various levels of vehicle "headaches" consumers experience, however, that might allow Ford some leeway in terms of owners giving it a second chance.

That's what Ford's O'Connor is hoping for in this new marketing campaign.

"Quality, for most consumers, in most segments, is an absolute top for them," O'Connor said. "This is probably the single most important proof point where a third party, through lots of data points, has endorsed Ford as a quality brand. We can point to this and say, 'This is the most respected third-quality ranking in the industry.' So it does change the narrative."

U-M's Gordon said people still tend to trust their own personal experiences, especially if they have been bad, more than any reported average good experience of thousands of strangers.

Brauer added that winning "a genuine shift in consumer perception will take years, requiring a consistent level of improved performance that manifests not only in industry data but through widespread owner experience."

In other words, good survey results from one or more industry groups is fine, but word-of-mouth testimonials are better.

"Of course, the influence of real-world, unsolicited testimonials among buyers and potential buyers takes longer, but they are far more powerful," Brauer said. "And they won't occur without a sustained shift in Ford's quality."

Jamie L. LaReau is the senior autos writer for USA TODAY Co. who covers Ford Motor Co. for the Detroit Free Press. Contact Jamie at jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. To sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Ford launches a quality ad campaign, but can it win back customers?

Reporting by Jamie L. LaReau, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press

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This story was originally published July 2, 2026 at 11:07 AM.