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Toyota ads get emotional

Many brands would love to be in Toyota's position: The company's market share is growing and it has a solid reputation for dependability and quality.

But as it got set to begin a new national advertising campaign for print and television yesterday, Toyota was hoping to prove that the brand can appeal to a customer's emotional side.

"We have to tap into what motivates people's behavior when they buy a car," said Deborah Wahl Meyer, Toyota's corporate manager for marketing communications. "People have to love the brand for more than its rational attributes."

Although the tagline of the old campaign was "Get the Feeling," many of the ads focused on the technical attributes of the company's vehicles. The new campaign -- with the tagline "Moving Forward" -- features vignettes about important moments in people's lives. Some are intended to be poignant, including one that shows a young woman's drive from her home in Texas to live in Hollywood. But others are meant to be humorous.

In one television ad, a young man is driving a Camry with his girlfriend in the backseat and her father in the passenger seat. "If I had known you were an attorney, Mr. Johnson, I would not have made that lawyer joke," the young man says as his girlfriend squirms and her father looks on disapprovingly. The ad ends by describing a defining life moment: "Meeting her dad."

Toyota even uses humor in new spots for its trucks, a category that traditionally extols technical specifications like torque and horsepower.

Ads poke fun at the need for bigger, tougher trucks. One shows Darrell Waltrip, a retired NASCAR driver, using his full-size Toyota Tundra pickup to pull off the door of his neighbor's garage so he can "get his tools back," he says.

In ads for the company's redesigned Tacoma, a compact pickup truck, Toyota parodies drug advertising by promising to fix problems that people didn't know they had -- for example, "adrenalinitis," which small truck owners supposedly suffer from because the vehicles they own don't have enough power.

In one ad, a young man starts his tiny truck as he would a lawnmower and is seen being passed on the highway by a scooter. The prescription for "adrenalinitis" is the Tacoma, which the ad says is "roomier, brawnier, versatilier" than the competition.

"These ads are much more about the emotion and less about the sheet metal," said James Lentz, group vice president of marketing for Toyota's US sales division.

Toyota's new ad campaign, created by the Torrance, California office of Saatchi & Saatchi, comes at a time of change and intense competition for the brand. Until the late 1990s, Toyota was known primarily for its cars, in particular the Camry.

But in the last decade, Toyota has become a major player in the US market, racking up big gains in market share that put it in direct competition with DaimlerChrysler, the No. 3-selling automaker in the country. Last month, Toyota's market share in the US was 12.66 percent, compared with DaimlerChrysler's 13.76 percent, according to Ward's AutoInfoBank. General Motors is No. 1, followed by Ford.
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