Go Gurl: Elena, First Female Ford Working in the Family's Automobile Company, Wants a Seat on the Board

NEW YORK, June 9 -- Elena Ford -- the first female Ford and fifth-generation member working at the family's automobile company -- tells Newsweek she is gunning for a seat on the company's board of directors and a top executive post in marketing. Ford, 36, hopes to become a Ford board member in three to five years, she tells Detroit Bureau Chief Keith Naughton in the current issue.

After seven years of unglamorous marketing positions at the company, Elena is currently Brand Manager for the troubled Mercury division, a brand with sales off 23 percent this year and which is beset with the same aging buyers and lack of cachet that killed Oldsmobile. Elena is planning to roll out new, crisply designed models in 2004 to go after sophisticated young professionals who drive Volkswagens. Launching a youth movement won't be easy and she admits the elderly customers "don't fit perfectly into our strategy," but argues Mercury needs them to help fund the brand's overhaul, Naughton reports in the June 17 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, June 10).

During a meeting about the two-track strategy, a staffer pitched a promotion at "upscale, active retirement communities," but Elena instead suggests a Mercury Mountaineer road show that piggybacks the publicity tour her mom, manners maven Charlotte Ford, is doing for her new etiquette book. "This is a way to get to our target audience," says Elena, "and my mother sells her book, too."