• by Karl Greenberg , December 12, 2006

Toyota is treating the February launch of its Tundra full-size pickup as if it were launching an entirely new division.

That's how determined the automaker is to grab share of the full-sized pickup truck market from the Big Three. It is the largest launch in Toyota's 40-year history in the U.S.

The company--according to Ernest Bastien, vice president-vehicle operations group--has reorganized its marketing and product development teams, brought in former GM marketer Kurt Ritter to lead a market segmentation study, opened its CAD files to SEMA member aftermarket companies five months before launch, created a two-part dealer training program, and launched a dealership design upgrade program.

Bastien said the Tundra launch involves a corporate restructuring that follows "obeya" or "big room" in Japanese. It's essentially a seminar-style relocation of Toyota planning, advertising, PR, event planning, distribution, accounting, and the company's University of Toyota education group that puts everyone in close proximity.

A dealership redesign program, called "Image USA II," will enable dealers to get loans to widen bays and otherwise make their showrooms more truck-friendly. "Dealers have invested $1 billion in the past three years, and will invest $2 billion more," Bastien said.

At dealerships, the company is running four-day product and marketing immersion training sessions to create "Truck Champions"--salespeople picked by their peers to oversee sales and local grassroots marketing for Tundra.

"The only dealer-training immersion we have done that even comes close to this was for the Prius launch," said Bastien. Besides a product immersion at the company's Tundra plant in Princeton, Indiana, "It includes how to involve the truck in events like high school football, fishing, and motocross," said Bastien. The company's Boston area regional manager said Toyota will show up at a raft of snowmobile events in Maine, handing out literature and Tundra-branded tie-downs, for example.

As for the more traditional road-show dealership training program in January, it's been expanded as well. "For the Camry launch, we trained around 18,000 dealer salespeople. For the Tundra launch, we will be training around 24,000," said Bastien.

In-store displays will include a toolbox concept in which drawers are filled with Tundra anatomical arcana like trans-axle ring gears, and disk brake components.

Indeed, in addition to the usual big-ticket marketing items that go along with February's launch (e.g, awareness-building elements like national advertising, promotions, and sports sponsorships, including a major relationship with Nascar-tied Camry's entry into the Busch and Nextel series of races) the campaign for Tundra will also be Toyota's largest grassroots effort to date pitching both the truck's capabilities and the fact that it was designed and built in the U.S.

Toyota, for example, will launch a road show called the "Prove it Tour," making 650 stops in 350 markets, according to Bastien. These include the Daytona 500, the Super Bowl, and the 84 Lumber PGA Golf Classic.

The Tour, somewhat reminiscent of Dodge's Truckville event in 2002 for its Ram, includes a promotion called Tundracross Challenge, in which attendees can compete on truck skills to be "America's Top Trucker."

While spending for the initiative was not disclosed, Toyota spent $160 million to launch the Camry, and this effort is in excess of that. Saatchi & Saatchi is handling advertising. Toyota--which has 200,000 units of capacity in its new plant in San Antonio, TX, and 100,000 in Indiana--plans to sell around 200,000 of the vehicles next year. Toyota sold around 126,500 of its smaller-body first-generation Tundras last year, and 112,040 through November 2006.