Toyota's Land Cruiser Campaign Takes Road Less Traveled

toyota land cruiser campaignThe 2008 Land Cruiser, which got its first redesign in a decade, launched late last year with a campaign noteworthy in at least one respect: it is arguably the first product launch by Toyota (exclusive of the Scion division) that used no traditional media.

That's because the vehicle has sales volume inverse to its size. The large SUV accounted for about 3,251 units delivered last year, around 0.1% of Toyota's sales last year in the U.S.

The new campaign is also contrarian in another way. In recent years automakers have moved decisively away from touting their body-on-frame SUVs only as off-road vehicles. Rather, in a concession to the real-world consumer experience, they have moved to position them more for sport and utility of the paved-surface kind.

Even Jeep, which now uses a "Have fun out there" motto, has gradually moved away from its old "Rubicon Ready" iconography. And Land Rover, which has put most of its off-roading adventure imagery around its G4 Adventure program, has taken to posing its SUVs in urban environments as stylish performance vehicles versus, say, Porsche's Cayenne.

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Toyota's campaign for Land Cruiser is all about the wilderness. The effort is via the Los Angeles, Calif., office of Saatchi & Saatchi. There are no ads in the usual sense. Rather, elements of the campaign, which put the vehicle in the Australian Northern Territory and Canada's Yukon Territory, are housed on sites like roadtothewild.com and the microsite for Land Cruiser with Toyota.com. The documentary-style effort features some 20,000 photos and hours of video by Randy Olson, a National Geographic photographer.

The target, says Steve Chavez, creative director, and Bob Fremgen, copywriter at the agency, has focused largely on current owners of Land Cruiser and other Toyota SUVs.

He says people in Toyota's owner database have been invited to attend a traveling photo exhibition and lecture series featuring the photographer. On the tour, which visited six cities around the country this year, attendees got a coffee table book of Olson's photos from the excursions. There is also a "mag-alog" a sort of long-form brochure of the expeditions and the vehicle. And Speed TV ran a 30-minute show about it.

"Working off of our Land Cruiser database, we found that owners are loyal and terrific 'town criers' for the brand," says Chavez. "We reach them via direct mail database, email blast; it's been through three or four different layers, with niche-style marketing long before the truck was available. We also pushed down and looked pretty strongly at databases of 4Runner and other Toyota SUVs."

The next phase of the campaign takes the vehicle, Olson, and other members of the creative team to Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. "It will be similar, with another chapter added to the web site," says Chavez. "And it will also generate volume two of the mag-alog."

"We are dealing with a niche brand and a very focused target," he says. "So we needed to approach that in a non-traditional way. Once we partnered with Randy Olson, we really wanted to put the pieces on the table and see how many things we could get out of it."

Fremgen says that the off-road focus also shelters the brand, to some degree, from soaring fuel prices if only because fuel-efficiency is unlikely to weigh heavily on the minds of people who have to have an off-road SUV. "Soccer moms have more economical vehicles to buy, but they are probably not off-road capable."

1 comment about "Toyota's Land Cruiser Campaign Takes Road Less Traveled ".
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  1. damion magee, September 2, 2009 at 1:18 a.m.

    I appreciate the concern which is been rose. The things need to be sorted
    out because it is about the individual but it can be with everyone
    Damion
    <a href="http://www.usedtoyotalandcruiser.com.au>Used Landcruiser</a>

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