Interactive Marketing: Does It Work for Toyota?
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One day, I saw a link to The 5th Door on my Google RSS. Intrigued, I clicked on it. It’s a Toyota website, consisting of bios and blogs from 5 urban (read: black) dudes. It’s a little hard to follow why exactly Toyota’s using these artsy hipsters to market their Toyota Matrix, except that if you pay close attention, they all drive them.
As for the mysterious 5th door? While it sounded like the entrance to a new realm of hyperreality, it was in fact the door to the hatchback. Sigh. Disappointing.
The blogs are just about their hipster lives, with the occasional mention or photo of the car. Not a whole lot of relevance to the product. The site includes tour dates where the car will be displayed, and links to some pretty cool events (Afro Punk Film Festival, et al).
The site is well designed in theory, but from a marketing standpoint, I feel it misses the mark. Reading the sagas of a guy visiting a flea market with his girlfriend in no way makes me inclined to buy the little hatchback (don’t get me started on hatchbacks. I have deep-seated feelings of animosity toward them).
I think Toyota would have done better creating MySpace/Facebook accounts to link to people with the car, and focused on the car, not random people that seem cool enough to influence others into buying the car.
But that’s just my 2 cents. Take a look at the site and tell us what you think. Did Toyota do an effective job on marketing with this site? What else could they have done to better reach their audience?
Of course, it did get me talking about it, so it can’t be all bad for Toyota.
Susan Payton is the Marketing Eggspert, and owner of 
Susan,
This sort of marketing works great for Honda and Toyota in Japan. It has become more like a culture cult there.
Uh… what’s wrong with hatchbacks?
Anyway, yeah, I don’t see how this would work well. I don’t see how these bloggers would stand out any more than the new blogs popping up every day. Maybe they will get better results if they can get more established bloggers to talk about the car?
Home Biss–
Interesting. Japan has a totally different culture when it comes to business and marketing, which I find neat.
Kelvin–
Good insight. Thanks for participating in the conversation.
I dunno, I just have an aversion to cars that look like bugs!
Susan
I think anymore, advertisers aren’t really trying to get people to buy things when they see commercials or advertisements, but merely remember their products when they are out buying something