Ford launched the fabled Mustang at the New York World’s Fair, on 17 April, 1964, marketed with much fanfare. Ford placed a lot of faith in its success with a major advertising campaign to stir up the imagination of the public, and stir it did. It took 22,000 orders on the first day, tripled expectations to over 418,000 orders in the first 12 months and a million sales by 2 March 1966. Now 60 years later in 2024, this American icon is into its sixth generation with over 10,000,000 Mustangs sold. Lee Iacocca, often cited as the brains behind the success of the Mustang, was a marketing whiz having moved quickly up the Ford corporate ladder. One of his successes was to offer plenty of options with the Mustang (and other vehicles of the time) which customers took advantage of. These options had a far greater percentage of margin than did the base vehicle, thereby greatly elevating the overall profit of the Ford for each financial year. A base Mustang was US$2,368 in 1964 (around US$22,969 in today’s money) but the average buyer spent around US$1,000 more on their cars on things such as air conditioning, larger wheels, more powerful engines, GT packages, etc.
Getting the Mustang into popular music (think Mustang Sally), hundreds of television, , and , have helped to elevate the status of the vehicle. Similarly, Iacocca contracted Carroll Shelby to produce racing and high powered versions of the humble Mustang. Ford actually took the Shelby production inhouse in 1968 but retained the insignia. As recently as 2022, the Shelby GT500 Mustang was still made by Ford with the word 'Shelby', emblazoned across its rear.
