Listen

Ford retail was designed around the transaction. Customers in the Shop and Use phases of their journey needed something that the traditional dealership floor was not set up to provide. The innovation team had seen that gap clearly and developed concepts to address it.

But getting a concept into a dealership means working within a world the innovation process does not fully account for. Dealers are independent business owners. They carry the cost of every new initiative, they manage the floor space, and they are the ones who have to actually sell it to customers. They have watched corporate programs arrive with momentum and quietly disappear. Their skepticism is reasonable.

For a concept to work in this environment, it had to clear four things at once.

Dealership Needs:

1. It had to visibly move the needle for customers.

2. It had to look good enough that dealers were proud to have it on their floor.

3. It had to fit alongside the other initiatives Ford was already asking them to execute.

4. And it had to feel like something they were choosing to invest in, not something being handed down to them.

That fourth point shaped the entire approach. Understanding dealer priorities as clearly as customer needs was not a nice-to-have. It was the foundation.

Simplify

The first thing the concepts needed was to be mapped against how a dealership actually operates. That meant walking through the full customer journey and finding where each concept lived, what it would ask of the sales staff, and how it interacted with the physical space, existing tools, and the economics of running a dealership.

Some things that looked straightforward in a mockup got more complicated in the real world. A display that worked at internal scale required sourcing decisions a dealer principal actually had to sign off on. A feature that improved the customer experience added cost or complexity that someone had to absorb. Details that seemed minor on paper had meaningful downstream consequences.

Working alongside designers meant bringing those constraints into the room as active criteria, not afterthoughts. Helping the team evaluate options for feasibility and viability alongside design quality was a consistent part of the work. The goal was to catch those conflicts early, before they became problems during testing.

Global leadership had visibility into the project throughout. Ford's internal business teams — Accessories, Merchandise, connected services — each had their own objectives and timelines. Dealer principals had a different set of concerns entirely, rooted in their own business economics and what they could realistically execute on their floor. Keeping the design direction coherent across all of those stakeholders, while staying grounded in what customers actually needed, required consistent facilitation and a clear point of view about what was worth protecting.

The concepts that went to in-market testing were the ones that cleared all of it.

Solve

Two concepts went to in-market testing. One was adopted nationally.

The research gave us a clear picture of why. 72% of customers reported increased purchase intent for Ford Bronco and Ranger after the experience. That number connected the customer experience directly to what dealers care about most: selling vehicles.

Getting to that outcome required more than a well-designed concept. It required something that fit how dealerships actually run, that dealers felt some ownership over, and that held together across the input of global leadership and multiple business teams with competing priorities.

Vehicle accessories selected and standardized for scale.

Close up of staging to showcase lifestyle with vehicle.

Kit focused on compatible accessories with guidance for dealer staging with other items.

Holding that design direction steady through all of it was the work. And the clearest proof that it worked is that the nationally adopted concept is live and available for dealers to add to their showrooms today. Dealers are choosing it. That was the bar from the beginning.