Has Lincoln Become a Classic Brand Without Modern Relevance?

Recently I was asked by a large automotive marketing firm to conduct a brand analysis for Lincoln.  Below is my review of Lincoln’s current market crisis:
With nearly a century‘s worth of history, Lincoln has proudly maintained the concept of elite, sophisticated luxury that the brand was initially built on. For generations the Town Car has been known as the pinnacle of high status. Designed to fill just such a role as the personal transport for Henry Ford, the Town Car brand has long defined its category, similar to Kleenex or Band-Aid, being the name used to describe a chauffeured vehicle long after additional players entered the space. And for 70 years the Lincoln Continental was the vehicle of choice for the successful family man. There is no doubt that Lincoln has always understood what it means to be a status brand – a symbolic expression of the personality and lifestyle of its users. However, as a sea of rival luxury brands continued to enter the market, Lincoln released a product that would forever change the positioning of the brand, opening it up to an endless potential of future-forward possibilities.
1998 brought the launch of the Lincoln Navigator and, although they may not have realized it at the time, this vehicle would set a new precedent of bringing luxury and class to emerging markets. The Navigator allowed Lincoln to enter the highly sought after market of SUVs, but in a way that opened the trend up to its core demographic. From that moment forward, this is where the power of the Lincoln brand would lie, in bringing its history and industry-leading standards of luxury to new automotive trends and new audiences. A lack of internal understanding and external communication of this new positioning, however, would soon cost the brand relevancy in the market.
As it stands now, a decade later, Lincoln’s brand has lost focus. New model vehicles have continued to bring luxury to new markets, including eco-friendly with hybrid support, technology focused with Sync and SIRIUS Travel Link, and power seekers with superior performance and handling and ultraquiet environments; however, this has most likely been as a means of keeping up with lower priced competitors rather than as pioneering a field. Additionally, Lincoln’s true audience has dramatically shifted from its original target. The successful family man is now a thirty year old entrepreneur.
If Lincoln is to uphold its heritage and regain its superiority in the market, it needs to understand how to reach and communicate with its new audience and reposition itself in a way that gives the audience a reason to care about the brand. It needs to remember what made the Navigator such a success. It needs to become the brand that brings luxury to groundbreaking technology.